


Two Birds in a Cage

by daystarsearcher



Series: Infernoverse [1]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: (of an alternate universe), Aftermath of Torture, Alternate Universe, Angst, Gen, Infernoverse, Stockholm Syndrome, Torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-08
Updated: 2016-02-08
Packaged: 2018-05-19 04:11:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 11
Words: 52,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5953147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daystarsearcher/pseuds/daystarsearcher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Inferno-verse AU. Miles below the earth, in the most secret and heavily guarded of all their prisons, they keep a man who builds them weapons that are decades and sometimes centuries ahead of their time. Reports come back of the things they bring him: books, chemicals, lab equipment. Young girls.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> **Notes** : An AU for the Inferno-verse, which I guess makes it an AU of an AU. Basically, the Doctor we know never popped in from our universe, but their version of the Doctor has been their prisoner for as long as he has been in exile. Oh, and the world never burned up, obviously.  
>   
> 

The world won’t hold still when she opens her eyes, so she lets them fall closed again. The pain still screaming and stinging and stabbing and echoing everywhere with every jostle and bump (bump?), but not increasing. So quiet, lovely lovely, no more loud bangs and shrieks and whistles (don’t let it rattle you don’t let it rattle you don’t let it), just mutterings and squeaking of wheels and she is…floating?

Lights, bright lights, still blaring. And then slipping back into blackness. Black like a dark pool. Light. Black. Light. Black.

Cold? Yes, cold. Further down in the complex? Yes, or dying. That would be nice. No more questions. No more shouting and hurting. No more—

Darkness.

Light.

An angel, wild-haired. Looking down at her. Hair wild like dandelion fluff and lit by the brightbrightbright light behind him, glowing. His face cast in shadow.

His face is made of the night and he is her judgment.

“It’s all right now,” says the angel. His voice is soft. He touches her cheek, and his hands are soft, callused, cold…cold? “I shall have you patched up in no time.”

Her eyes slide shut again. Still floating, no drifting, but the squeaking sounds are gone. So she is dying now. That’s nice. 

“Sleep, Miss Smith.”

Darkness.

xxxxx

She hears singing in her sleep.

She does not understand the words.

It sounds rather like a lullaby.

xxxxx

Shouting.

It is the first thing SJ registers, and she curls tight to brace herself for the blow. It doesn’t come.

It takes several seconds to realize the shouting is not directed at her.

“—not to mention four concussions over a similar number of days, numerous lacerations and contusions, electrical burns, a left hand that it is frankly miraculous that she is going regain any use of, given that when you brought her here it resembled nothing so much as _hamburger_ —”

“Spare me your excuses.” Sharp, crisp, female. “There’s been an upsurge in worker discontent in several key areas, including London and Manchester. We need the guns for crowd management, and we need them now.”

She knows that voice. She’s heard that voice, cool, controlled. Almost bored, as it gave orders to the interrogators.

Section Leader Beth Shaw.

“Then perhaps you should have taken that into account when you were torturing the poor girl, and showed some damned restraint!”

“The girl was not your first priority—”

She risks a peek through her eyelashes. She is on some kind of a hospital bed with the curtain left partially open; a tug at her wrist tells her there is an IV line. 

Across the room the man is facing Shaw, hands gripping at the prison cell bars as if he would like to tear them apart to throttle the Section Leader. He is tall, pale-haired. SJ can’t make out any other details without opening her eyes wider.

“It can hardly help the research if my new assistant cannot assist me.”

“The fact remains, Doctor, that you are forty units behind schedule, and—“

Doctor.

And now she knows where she is.

He is shouting again, but she cannot hear the words over the echoes of that name in her head.

She has only heard that name in rumors.

Miles below the earth, in the most secret and heavily guarded of all their prisons, they keep a man who builds them weapons that are decades and sometimes centuries ahead of their time. Reports come back of the things they bring him: books, chemicals, lab equipment.

Young girls.

Shaw turns, heels clicking sharply against the floor as she strides away. The Doctor huffs in frustration, slumping a bit before taking a deep breath and turning back around. SJ quickly closes her eyes.

“It’s no use pretending to be asleep, Miss Smith. I heard your breathing pattern shift.”

It doesn’t occur to her to doubt him; some of the rumors have mentioned that he may not be quite…human. She opens her eyes. Tries to sit up, but her head starts to swim and she slips, back down onto the mattress.

“Take your time.”

SJ grits her teeth and does, though the urge to be sitting or standing or anything less vulnerable than _this_ is making the adrenaline rise like a swamping wave through her, pushing her to rush. She notices that her clothing has been changed, that it and she are clean, _have been cleaned_ ; it is a tiny echo of a note in the rising chainsaw-buzz of terror in the back of her mind.

They bring him young girls.

The guards have shown her the many diverting things that can be done to young girls, even when they have already told you everything they know and more besides.

It is probably less than thirty seconds but feels like forever when she manages to get her back up against the headboard. The Doctor does not make a move towards her, so she studies him.

He looks human enough. Tall, as she noticed before. Older, but not decrepit. Broad-shouldered but still the prison uniform hangs loose on him; his face is gaunt. His eyes are ice blue and measuring as he studies her back.

She wants to dart a glance down at her left hand but she can’t look away. She feels it with her right hand instead. So, he couldn’t save the index and the middle fingers. And the skin is still raw.

 _What now?_ she opens her mouth to say, before remembering.

Something happens in his eyes. He shifts closer. “Yes, I’m afraid so.” Two fingertips against her throat, so cold they are almost burning. She will not tremble. “They only do that to the ones who dare tell them the truth, you know. Who keep talking back, telling the interrogators the truth about themselves and their sorry little tyrant that they cannot bear to hear. So they silence them.” He ghosts his fingertips over the scar. “You must have been very brave.”

She makes herself look him directly in the eye, keep looking. She does not acknowledge the flattery. She waits for him to say what he wants.

He withdraws, returns with a notebook and pen. “This will have to do for now. It’s a pity—I have missed the sound of another voice since Josie left.”

His hand brushes hers when she takes the pen, and she flinches—berating herself instantly for the tell. A flinch is like blood in the water.

But the Doctor does not notice, or pretends not to. In fact, he seems to forget all about her, turning back to a series of bubbling beakers.

The cell is larger than she had realized at first; it only looks small because it is so crammed with scientific equipment, with little room to maneuver between the dozens of whirring, clicking, humming machines whose functions she can only guess at.

Some of the equipment looks quite heavy. She’s still weak, but with his back turned, she’d have time to lift something high enough and bring it back down…

And then? She can’t run. She’d be executed. 

She’s going to be executed anyway, when he’s done with her. Judging by the amount of work he’s put into her recovery, he’s probably planning to keep her for awhile. It might be better just to end it now.

But if they don’t end it, not right away. If they take her back to The Room—

“When you feel up to walking a bit, fetch me that rack of test tubes on the cabinet,” he says without turning around. “I need to test the different alloys for soldiering the stem bolts.”

She grips the pen tight. Not enough information to make a decision yet. Very well, then. Waiting.

She looks down at the notebook. Waiting, and gathering information.

SJ’s rather good at that.


	2. Chapter 2

**One guard at the end of the corridor. Walks past cell approx. once per fifteen minutes, with three to ten randomly timed approaches as well. To keep the Doctor on his toes, or to ward off boredom? Both possible. Shifts change every two and half hours.**

**No visible cameras beside the one at the door to the stairwell. Does not mean they are not there.**

**Have not yet seen Doctor sleep. Presumably does so in green armchair. The bed seems to be mine; he does not come past the curtain. But when I wake up I can always see his shadow where he stands at the counter. Sometimes he mutters to himself; I can’t understand the words. And he must stop when he hears me wake up, but sometimes he is singi**

“Miss Smith,” the Doctor says.

SJ stands, comes quickly to his side. She flips the notebook mostly closed with practiced ease, moving from the back pages with her long lists of observations—in alternating ciphers, just in case, though she has been careful not to let slip any detail in her deliberations that might lead back to other members of the resistance—to the front of the notebook, where she keeps the notes the Doctor asks her to take, and her silent side of their conversations.

She is using far more pages in the back than in the front. The Doctor ignores her, mostly, now that she is healed. Most of their interactions consist of him telling her to fetch or hold or take down something, and then dismissing her.

She thinks, though, that he watches her. She has never caught him doing it, but she feels the weight of his eyes on her back.

“Bring this crucible to a boil,” he says. “Let me know the second you see steam, unless you want to lose your eyes as well.”

SJ nods, but he has already turned away from her, wiring copper around flashing lightbulbs and glowing gemstones set in brass. When he is not looking, she pockets a microchip she knows he was planning to use in a laser gun prototype later.

She looks at the crucible, and wonders how many of her friends this mixture will kill.

**Learning some of the names of the machines. Some of it rubbish they would’ve thrown away at Eastchester. Some of it more advanced than anything I’ve seen before. Some doesn’t look like it’s made for people with two eyes and five fingers.**

**Wall of filing cabinets. Locks easily jimmied, and the countertop blocks the camera from the bottom drawers. Not a lot of time to snoop: still seems like he never sleeps. Only left alone when he’s in the bath.**

**Language in the files very technical. Not any use to me in here. Not sure if any use to me if I could get out.**

The water is cold, the soap harsh against her skin. SJ works her fingers through her hair quickly, heart pounding. She only uses the shower when the Doctor is engrossed in some experiment, and she keeps her visits under five minutes. Acceptable risk.

She knows logically that she is hardly any more vulnerable here than anywhere else in the cell. Logic isn’t very persuasive against the freezing water splattering over her, and the memory of his fingertips like ice against her broken vocal cords.

SJ twists the faucet to the right, and with a shriek of pipes, the water complies and turns to a trickle and then nothing. Shivering, she reaches out through the curtain for a towel, dries herself quickly. Reaches out again, this time for her clothes.

They are not there.

“This will simply not do, Miss Smith,” says the Doctor.

She freezes.

“Open the curtain.”

SJ draws the towel tighter around her body. Tries to take hold of the curtain. Her hands are cold and cramped and shaking, a little, and it is hard at first to grasp the slippery plastic. She pulls it aside.

The Doctor is holding her clothing in one hand, the seams of her right sleeve undone. The other hand holds the three razor blades and miscellaneous chemical pellets she’d had secreted away there. She glances towards her notebook and pen at his feet.

He sees. “That will not be necessary. You have nothing to add to this conversation beyond indicating yes or no. Now, I am going to talk, and you are going to _listen_.”

He steps towards her; she backs up a step automatically, her feet almost slipping on the wet tile. His eyes are searing right through her.

“Were these intended for me?”

 _No._ She shakes her head, looking down at the floor. It’s the truth, for what it’s worth. Not that he’ll believe it.

“For you, then?”

A nod.

 _”Look at me_ when I address you.”

She makes herself meet the Doctor’s eyes, her only tell the tightening of her jaw, her front teeth piercing her lip. He advances towards her, his steps steady and calculated. She will not back away this time. She will not tremble.

He stops only inches away from her. “You will not do this again.” His voice is low and hard. He cups her cheek with his left hand so she cannot look away. His hand is winter frost against her skin. “Did you know they built this prison around me? I crashed to Earth, through layers and layers of rock until my craft lay smashed on a subterranean cave floor, and they built this cage around me, the chained dragon in his cave with his useless shining treasures. Alone with the machines, and the guards like machines who never speak to me, and do you know how long it took them to bring you here after Josie left? It took them fifty-seven days, thirteen hours, and nine minutes to bring you here and it has been four years and thirty-eight seconds since I have seen the sky and _you will not do this again._ ”

His eyes are ice and fire, and she is drowning in them, and she is burning.

“Do I make myself clear?”

She nods. 

“Good.” He drops his hand, the intensity turned off like a switch. Drops her clothes at her feet. “Get dressed. I’ll need you for the next stage of the chemical analysis.”

**Doctor back to ignoring me. Acts as though the confrontation never happened. Hasn’t tried to touch me again; even puts things down on table rather than handing them to me.**

**Still feel him watching me. Still haven’t caught him.**

**Twice he’s mentioned Josie now. No other names.**

“Doctor.”

SJ looks up, and nearly drops her pen.

She hasn’t seen this man since growing up in the scientific labor camp. Even Aunt Lavinia didn’t like to anger him.

He didn’t have the eyepatch then.

“Alistair,” the Doctor returns, not glancing up from his notes. Calm as water on cloudless day. “I thought they had shipped you back to Eastchester.”

“It’s a wonder they didn’t,” the Brigade Leader returns dryly, “when one takes into account how very badly you bungled that last order of guns.” His gaze grows hard. “That will not happen again.”

“I’m working with substandard materials,” the Doctor says. He glares pointedly at both the outdated equipment and at SJ, perched on the edge of the bed. “It would be highly irresponsible of me to make promises.”

Lethbridge-Stewart gives her a cool glance, eyes flicking up and down her body. “I suppose you want another blonde.”

“Hair color, Brigade Leader? Really? I was referring to the damage she sustained on her way here.”

“Beggars can’t be choosers, Doctor,” the military man says, smirking slightly. “In these difficult economic times, we must all learn to adjust to goods that are…pre-used.”

The Doctor’s hand tightens to a fist below the counter. The Brigade Leader can’t see, but SJ does.

“Of course, if she really is impeding your work, I suppose I could have her sent to the firing squads…”

SJ’s heart stops.

“That won’t be necessary,” the Doctor snaps. “She’s better than nothing, anyway.”

SJ’s heart begins to beat again. She lets out a breath that had caught in her throat; it hurts.

“We’d get you another one.”

“I _said_ , that won’t be necessary.” He’s plainly agitated now, his hands fretting at the cogs of his latest project as he tries to fit them together.

“No need to get your knickers in a twist, Doctor. I’m merely looking after your quality of life.”

“How terribly kind of you. Did you actually have anything important to tell me, or could you go now and look after my quality of life from further away?”

The Brigade Leader’s jaw clenches. “I’m here to escort you to the conference room. It seems Section Leader Shaw and I must again have this tedious discussion with you about the terms of our agreement, and the many ways in which you have recently lacked…discipline.” 

The Doctor’s eyes flick up at last, but he looks down again just as quickly. “I’m busy.” He picks up a wrench, uses it to tighten a bolt.

Lethbridge-Stewart gestures at the soldiers behind him. “You will recall that this is not optional, Doctor.”

“I’m working on a very intricate and delicate piece of equipment. Surely even your blunted military mind can see the irony in slowing my progress by hauling me off to a disciplinary action for my slow progress.”

His voice is calm and controlled, in contrast to his hands, which are moving very quickly but cannot seem to make anything fit together. His shoulders are hunched. He does not make eye contact with the Brigade Leader.  
.  
Is he…afraid?

Lethbridge-Stewart gives a long-suffering sigh. “This won’t go well for you if you resist.”

“I will not go!” the Doctor thunders, slamming his fist down on the table. The delicate machinery crashes to the floor, shatters into an infinity of broken glass stars and bolts and ball bearings. He freezes for a second, then forces a bluster: “I have done all that you asked, and my work cannot be interrupted at this critical juncture—”

And yes, there it is, SJ hears it working its way into his voice: panic, and the beginnings of resignation.

The Brigade Leader is smirking again, and she knows he hears it too.

“Very well, then. If you are too busy to attend, we will have the girl relay the message to you.”

SJ’s hands clench involuntarily at the edge of the mattress.

The Doctor’s hands still. “What?”

SJ cannot move. 

“Delegation, Doctor. Quite simple really. The girl will attend in your stead, and Section Leader Shaw and I will…impart the usual lessons.” He gives a nod to the soldier behind him, who pulls out a keyring and a set of handcuffs.

The edges of SJ’s vision have gone blaring white, and she can hear her heartbeat pounding through her ears. _Run run run nowhere to run run run run nowhere to run—_

_(The Room with the cuffs the chains the noises and shouting and shouting and can’t move can’t speak and the pain and the pain and the— she’ll tell them anything anything make it stop please God Mummy somebody anybody make it stop—)_

The key goes into the lock with the dead scraping sound of metal on metal, and the Doctor’s is at the door in three strides, his hand shooting out to cover the Brigade Leader’s. One of his lackeys hefts a baton, but Lethbridge-Stewart merely raises an eyebrow. “Are you asking me to dance?”

The Doctor’s voice is so low she almost does not hear it through the roar in her brain. “I find that…I am not as busy as I previously thought.”

“Are you certain? We would not want any delays. It might save time for all if we took the girl instead.”

“I’m certain. I’ll go with you.”

“And as a former terrorist sympathizer, I’m sure she needs a spot of disciplining as well. We could take care of that for you, as you work tirelessly on your research.”

“I _said_ I’ll go with you. I’ll cooperate. I will do whatever you ask.”

They lock gazes for several interminable seconds, and then the Brigade Leader nods, the gesture sharp. His eyes cold. “Do not disappoint me, Doctor. Remember what happens when you go back on your word.”

The Doctor lets them cuff him and lead him away.

**So the Doctor’s afraid of the Brigade Leader and the Section Leader. Still baits them, though. Trying to see how far he can push them? Or trying to end it, trying to get himself killed?**

**He should know he’s too valuable to ever really kill off.**

**~~He didn’t have to~~ **

**Strange how it can take less than a week of little to no pain to make one cling to life again. I was ready to die, back in The Room, and when I first got here. And now…now I don’t know.**

**~~Why did he~~ **

**The Brigade Leader and Shaw have bought me some time, I suppose.**

It’s nearly midnight when they bring him back, time enough for SJ to make a complete inventory of the supply cabinets, sweep the shattered remnants of the Doctor’s machine into a pile (he may want to salvage some of it later), and secret two large jagged shards of glass into little nooks and crannies she can get to in an emergency.

(She makes sure to choose places that will look as though the glass might’ve gotten swept there accidentally. Acceptable risk.)

It’s nearly midnight when they bring him back, when they throw him into the cell. He stumbles to his knees, and when he pushes himself up he leaves a bloody handprint on the floor.

SJ starts towards him, a skitter-step, not certain if she’s offering to help him.

His shoulders tense, and she backs away.

The Doctor stands, and limps towards the shower area. It is a very particular kind of limp. Familiar. He begins to pull the curtain aside, and then he turns and glowers at her. “Stay where you are.”

When he turns back towards the shower SJ sees a smear of red above his collar that is not quite the right shade for blood.

She stays where she is. His shower is a full half hour long than usual.

When the water shuts off, it’s still a long time before his hand reaches out for the towel, and even longer before he emerges. His face has gone grey with the effort of standing upright, and the cloth can’t quite cover the bruises on his chest. He kicks his clothes aside rather than deal with them.

“I need the bed tonight,” he says. He doesn’t look at her as he pushes past. “Do not disturb me.”

He collapses onto the mattress with a sound like a sack of meat hitting the ground. Barely manages to pull the curtain shut.

SJ spends the night in the armchair. Her sleep is as disjointed and uneasy as it has been in the bed, but when she wakes, there is only silence.

She cannot even hear him breathe.

**Jimmied another file cabinet open. More technical notes. Several files of what looks like star charts.**

**~~What was he~~ **

**~~It doesn’t mean~~ **

SJ wakes again to the sound of the mattress creaking, as he sits up. He walks briskly out of her sightline to dress, and comes back to the lab table. He seems to have entirely regained his energy.

But the way he is moving…what he is doing. Shuffling materials around. Lots of clinking and clanking. Lots of stopping and peering, and making pointed little extraneous“hmm” and “ah” and “yes, quite” noises.

Science may not be her forte, but SJ knows busywork when she sees it.

She gets up, walks to his side. Keeps her head down, eyes flicking up and then back, as she places a piece of paper by his hand.

**Are you alright?**

He glances down at it, looks away. “You’ll have your bed back tonight,” he says, fumbling with the bunsen burner. Not really an answer. “Fetch the sodium chloride; that should stabilize this reaction.”

She does as he says, and when he doesn’t ask for anything else, she steels herself—she does not like standing this close to him for this long, does not like being within arm range—and puts another piece of paper on the table. **Thank you**.

That startles him into looking at her. “What? What for?”

 **You could have sent me instead** she writes, just below the formulas he had her jot down last afternoon. She feels his eyes on her; she cannot look up or she will be paralyzed. **You didn’t. So thank you**.

“That—that was nothing—“

 **IT WASN’T** she insists, pen pressing hard into the paper.

“I don’t want to discuss it!” he snaps, stepping backward, away from her, and his emphatically waving right hand ( _don’t want_ ) knocks the crucible off its perch.

She shoves him, and he’s just startled enough to be off balance and stagger two steps out of the way and so the drops splash only on her arm and _oh_ , her eyes widen as a thousand little teeth bite sharp into her skin, scorching blazing pain burrowing in and slamming into every nerve it can find, and her mouth opens in a scream that makes no sound—

The floor sweeps out from under her before she realizes he’s picked her up like a doll and swung her onto another countertop. He rips open her sleeve and turns the water faucet on full blast. She can feel tears dripping down her cheeks and she can’t stop them, it hurts, it hurts as bad as anything they did in The Room—

“Why did you do that?” he is yelling, and the words are taking a very long time to become words and not just yelling because she is shaking too hard and he is too close and his eyes are flashing and he is filling up her brain with white lights and white noise and panic. She cannot get away. “Foolish girl! It wouldn’t have hurt _me_ , you didn’t have to—why in the name of Rassilon would you—”

The Doctor rips open a packet and pulls out a syringe, grabs her arm; she yanks it away, a sob seizing up in her throat. No sound, she will scream and scream and no sound…

Something happens in his eyes again. The blaze dies down, becomes a dim glow. He takes a step back. “It’s for the pain,” he says softly, and presses the tip of the syringe against his own skin. Pushes down to empty half of it. “See? Won’t even send you to sleep.”

He moves towards her and she scuttles back on the counter but then she is against the wall and there is nowhere to retreat. She goes rigid when he takes her arm, more gently this time, and she twists her head away, shuddering. He’s seen how weak she is, now. There’ll be no more stopping him. No bluffing.

The needle is a tiny jab against the shrieking stinging ache of where the acid ate into her skin, but she cannot stop the second sob either.

And then the pain is going…going…gone?

Somehow its sudden absence is even more shocking. She snatches her arm back, cradles it to her chest.

The Doctor simply reaches out and takes it again, rubbing a white salve into her skin. He focuses entirely on her arm, as if the rest of her didn’t exist, humming intently as he works the white ointment over every burn. After awhile, the humming becomes words: “Klokleda partha menin klatch, haroon haroon haroon…”

SJ feels her shoulders slump, despite her rapid heart rate. Her muscles untensing, bones melting as though she were sinking into a warm bath.

“Klokleda sheenah tierra natch, haroon haroon haroon…”

Her eyelids are growing heavy. No, stay alert, stay—

“Haroon, haroon, haroon…”

 _You’re doing something to my mind_ , she thinks, before he reaches up with one hand and touches her temple, stroking away her hair. “Klokeda partha menin klatch…” he whispers, and she falls into his eyes and she can’t remember what she was worried about, she was worried about something…

“Why did you do that?” he asks. His voice is hushed. “Why did you push me out of the way?”

 _Instinct_ , she thinks, and it’s almost as if he can hear her, because he’s looking at her as if he’s only just seeing her for the first time, as if she’s someone or something entirely new.

His hand is cold but it is difficult to remember why that frightened her when nothing hurts and everything in her mind is warm and lovely, and he strokes her skin as he murmurs, “Haroon, haroon, haroon…”

 _I’m not a child. I don’t need lullabies and happily-ever-afters_. 

It is her last rebellious thought before she drifts off into sleep.


	3. Chapter 3

She dreams.

It’s not the feverish flash of sensations her dreams usually are-- _table with leather restraints, ragged shears, smell of iron, exploding IED, fist to her stomach, “traitor whore!”_

No, time moves forward neat and uniform, no laws of physics broken, no flashes of illogic, no Point A leading to Point B before leaping wildly over to Point Z and doubling back to Point #DoubleQ9.

She forgets, sometimes, briefly, that it’s a dream. That her life here with the Doctor is not this simple or this easy. That they do not banter, that he does not smile softly at her. That when she is tired she does not lean her head against his shoulder, and he does not start and then very carefully put his arm around her.

She would forget, entirely, but there’s a feeling. In the back of her mind. Not the gnawing anxiety of her normal dreams, that hot-breath-on-the-back-of-her-neck hunted chased feeling that whispers _something’s coming something’s coming badbadbad_ , where she runs and trips and falls and never gets away, runs so fast but always ends up where she began, trapped.

No, it’s just…muzzy. Removed. Floating. A dream-feeling from a dream that is not a nightmare. As though the world around her is slightly unfocused, like a cheap telly or an Impressionist painting. As though it’s all a story she’s telling herself, or being told…she remembers being afraid of the Doctor, but she can’t remember the shape of those fears, the sharp edges and cruel corners of them.

It’s not as if they’re gone. No, it’s more like someone draped a sheet over them and left it there, and every time she thinks about perhaps lifting up a corner to take a look, there’s always something much more interesting to do.

And so she drifts through this dream that’s like her everyday life but with the rough grain of her captivity sanded down and smoothed over. She fetches the Doctor test tubes. He smiles and thanks her. The rations arrive and they eat together, the weak tea and the bit of bread. He examines her arm and reapplies the salve and the bandages. She takes notes on his three simultaneous experiments until he catches her yawning, and then he sends her off to sleep. A light rap on the bedpost awakens her for the next day.

It is like walking through a cloud.

xxxxx

On the third dream day—is it the third?—there is nothing left of her burns but small pale scars that can only be seen when the light hits them in a certain way. The Doctor rubs in another layer of salve anyway, his fingers tracing their whitish-pink edges.

“I’m sorry,” he says softly. Looking at her arm, not looking at her.

She thinks he means the scars, and she shakes her head, but he stills her with a touch, the tips of his fingers feather-light along her jawline.

“I have enjoyed the company,” he says. He almost smiles, and then his face goes grave again. “But it is time.”

She doesn’t understand.

“The active ingredient in the salve is countered by stress hormones. I am sorry. I do hope you will remember that.” His fingers trace up to her temple. “It’s time to come back, Miss Smith.”

There’s something like a brush against her mind, and then a tug, and then—

_Fingers like ice, can’t run—_

_\--she puts her head against his shoulder and he starts, and then carefully puts his arm around her—_

_“I’m working with substandard materials.”_

_\--the splash of acid like fire against her skin—_

_\--his hand, hard, forcing her face up to meet his gaze—_

_“This simply will not do, Miss Smith.”_

_\--he strokes a strand of hair back over her ear--_

It hits. All of it, at once. The sheet has slipped away and the shapes underneath hold every jagged edge of her former fear, and she can see and hear and taste and touch every facet of that terror. They buffet her like a storm, like blocks of ice-melt in a raging river. They are rushing over her so fast she is drowning, pummeling straight through her and—

And then it is done. 

All of her memories are back. They are bright and clear, and they light a fire inside her frame that shoots up into her hands and her eyes. And she is not afraid.

She is _furious_.

SJ shoves away from him and then changes her mind, grabs his hand and yanks it towards her. He is startled, but doesn’t try to pull away.

She glares straight into his eyes as she scrapes down his palm with her fingernails, **YOU BASTARD**. Each letter scrawled on top of the other. **YOU HAD NO RIGHT**

The Doctor tries to look away, and she jerks his arm. Makes him face her. 

“I had hoped you’d realize—I did remove the veil from your mind as soon as it was safe, Miss Smith.” He meets her eyes, holds his gaze steady. “I didn’t have to do that.”

 **You made me into your little doll** \--her nails dig deep-- **and I’m supposed to be grateful it wasn’t permanent?**

“No. No, of course not. But—“

**But what? But it was to help me? To heal? You didn’t even ask, you went into my mind and you**

“You were in no state to give consent.”

**well isn’t that convenient**

“Did I take anything you were not prepared to give?” he says, his voice rising. “In all the time I had you here, at my mercy, was I ever not gentle?”

She has scrawled so many words onto his palm that it is warm to the touch. **I know your kind of gentle. I saw it in the camps every day, how the soldiers thought they deserved a medal if they used bribery or blackmail instead of brute force to get what they wanted, arrange everything so we had to beg them for their charity at whatever price they asked so don’t talk to me about** she scratches the word hard into his skin— **gentle.**

SJ doesn’t let go of his hand so much as throw it back to him in disgust. The Doctor reaches out, his mouth opening in some kind of protest. SJ bats his advance away and glares. Daring him to try to touch her again.

He lets his hand drop. 

For the first time in a long while, SJ feels like herself.

xxxxx

By unspoken mutual agreement, SJ continues to assist him with his work. She cannot afford the wrath of the Brigade Leader; the Doctor still has that power over her. He still holds all the cards but one, and SJ is keeping a firm grip on that newfound piece of insurance: the Doctor does not want her to hate him.

He _could_ beat her. He _could_ rape her. He _could_ kill her. But he won’t, because that would ruin the way he wants her to see him.

He could also hypnotize her again into unthinking adoration. But he won’t do that either, because he knows now that it wouldn’t satisfy him. That it wouldn’t be real.

They move in a stop-motion pantomime of their previous routine; it is SJ who presses into his personal space now, and the Doctor who shies away. She watches him constantly; he has eyes only for the work. The clinks and clangs of the machinery are doubly loud, as they are doubly silent—the Doctor communicates most of his commands with gesture. She is not certain if his withdrawal is meant to be appeasement or a punishment.

SJ finds herself thinking of her newsrunner group, a splinter off the main London resistance cell. It feels odd; she has purposefully not thought of them for such a long time. At first because she didn’t want to spill real secrets until she had muddied the waters with enough lies to keep her interrogators guessing, and then because it hurt to think of what might have happened to them, or still be happening.

But she thinks of them now, constantly.

Andrea, the forger of passes and writs, who’d caught a leg full of shrapnel not long after SJ had joined up, and was these days confined to a safe house in Croydon. Fitzoliver, utterly useless at ferreting out information, but a dead good actor, perfect for playing the simpering and cowering craven for the checkpoint soldiers, right up until the point where he pulled out a knife and stabbed them in the eye. Audrey, always carrying around her own modified machine gun and that locket with the picture of her dead little girl, Dottie—Dottie II, the runners all called her, to keep from confusing her with the older, living Dottie with her secretarial job at an information processing facility, from where she gleaned a lot of the news SJ had run to the border. Good with explosives and secrets, Audrey and Dottie.

And Sully. Sully with his daft smile and his ever-courteous manner, even when he was staunching the flow from her femoral artery while bombs exploded overhead, improvising a bandage out of the print-outs while she swore at him for using the civilian casualty reports they were supposed to be taking to their American contact in Calais. _Do be quiet, old girl, I’m having a devil of a time keeping all this blood inside your body without you distracting me._

She thinks of their faces, reviewing every line and mole and scar; their voices, and how they changed whether they were whispering code words at the keyhole or lying straight-faced to the immigration authorities or laughing around Andrea’s fire with a bottle of contraband whiskey. She will not forget that Sully was six inches taller than Fitzoliver, or the way Audrey’s hands shook when she carried anything but a gun, or the patterns of polka dots on the dresses Dottie II sewed herself, with hidden pockets to hide filched papers. 

She must not forget a single thing. 

She goes over and over every detail in her mind’s eye, fixing them in her brain. And then she looks out at the cell, the iron bars and the thick walls. Miles below the surface, cameras and state-of-the-art security systems on every level between here and the sky. The faceless soldiers assigned to guard detail are replaced like cogs in a machine, and the only person she sees two days in a row is the Doctor, the only person who ever speaks to her—though he speaks so little now, she thinks she might have forgotten what human speech sounds like—is the Doctor, the only person she could reach out and touch is the Doctor.

Sometimes SJ thinks he has already won.

xxxxx

They are putting together some sort of tracking devices, or possibly alarms—the Doctor hadn’t explained what they were, only how to fit the components together. Whenever she can, SJ has been putting the control chips in backwards. She keeps one eye on him, so he doesn’t see her do it.

Which is how she sees him thread the copper wire around the power source in a way he specifically told her not to. 

A way that looks almost exactly like the correct way but will drain the battery twice as fast as it should, and will drain it even faster each time it’s recharged, if it doesn’t melt the control chip first.

She keeps watching him. He doesn’t do it on the next device, or the next. Or the next. It could have been a fluke. Overwork, or inattention, or—

He does it again.

SJ tries to keep count as she works on her own pile of components. Now that she knows what to look for, it pops out. A steady, predictable rhythm.

The Doctor is sabotaging every fifth machine.

Why?

“Eyes on your own work, Miss Smith.” She can’t help but jump; it’s more words together than he’s said to her all week. And then he adds more: “Or I might have to come over and examine yours.”

She looks up sharply, and he winks. His eyes are amused.

_He knows._

Her heart stops cold. She ducks her head back down, willing it to beat again. _Don’t panic, if he hasn’t stopped you or ratted you out yet…_

_Unless he’s planning on using it for blackmail._

Her hand slips as she tries to snap the pieces together.

 _But he can’t, because he’s—unless that’s_ why _he’s doing it, to increase the threat--_

“My dear girl, you’re going to break something doing it like that.” The Doctor reaches over and pops the control chip in for her, backwards. “We wouldn’t want that; after all, these materials are dreadfully rare. If these turn out not to be cost-effective, they’ll be discontinued.”

There’s a very careful casualness in the way he says these last two sentences. In her old life, SJ would have known exactly what he meant and how to respond. But in here—

“Not everything is a trap, Miss Smith.”

He lays his left hand next to hers, palm up. An invitation.

She does not take it.

“This is all I require, Miss Smith.” His voice low, gentle. “You here, with me; your presence in this space. The sound of your heartbeat, of the breaths you take. Perhaps, an occasional conversation.” His voice goes softer still. “I will not ask more of you.”

He sounds almost convincing; SJ might even believe him, if she didn’t remember what his voice can do.

She flips open her notebook. **Did that line work with Josie?**

He pulls his hand away, indignant. “I never took advantage of her!”

 **But you wanted to** she presses. His defensiveness tells her that much.

His fists clench for just half a second before he whirls away, pacing to the other end of the cell and back. He takes a deep breath. “It would be a cruel cosmos indeed, if we were judged solely by our desires and not our actions.” 

**And where is Josie now?**

The Doctor’s eyes go still, and far away. He is silent for so long that SJ thinks he will not answer. And then:

“I saw it hurt her, every day, the little things she learned, what she had been sheltered from all her life. You and I, Miss Smith, we are what we are, what we were made into. Nothing left to save. But with Josie … she didn’t belong in this world. It could do nothing but cause her needless pain.”

He looks at her, or through her, and SJ has never seen his eyes this helpless. Not even when the soldiers pulled him away.

“Nothing in this world can hurt her now.”


	4. Chapter 4

**They bring you girls.**

His face is already guarded as he looks down from his calculations to her notebook. She’s been doing this all week; it’s getting harder to make him flinch.

“Well, I hardly think that’s fair,” he says. His tone striving for lightness. He holds a test tube up to the light, examines its color and transparency. “You’re only the second girl they’ve ever brought me if one doesn’t count Beth, seeing as she turned out to be a spy.” 

He’s let slip the information without even seeming to realize it, and that should be enough, words fallen like forgotten diamonds into her hands, but— SJ’s heart hammers against her ribcage, clamoring to her brain to stop it, this is beyond stupid, stop it _now_ —

But her hand writes **Beth Shaw? You expect me to believe you had the Section Leader for your assistant?** anyway.

She knows this is dangerous, needling him as she’s been doing for the past seven days. Stepping right in his way, letting experiments come within an inch of boiling over. Curling up tight in her bed and not coming out when he raps the bedpost, testing his resolve and silent promise. Testing _him._

And she’s started asking questions. 

‘Started.’ As if she could stop.

“The one and only,” the Doctor says. A slight grimace, his eyes and his mind seeming to focus on something far away. “Got a nice little promotion for her trouble; I believe she was a Platoon Under Leader before.” He comes back. “I’m afraid she’s the reason I was initially rather cold to you; she took a beating as well, you see. For verisimilitude. Not quite on the level of what you received, but still…” His voice takes on a certain bitterness. “She always did believe in going above and beyond the call of duty.”

And maybe she could’ve stopped then, at least for a little while. If he’d stopped too. She doesn’t _want_ to keep baiting him, not really, but just when the embers of her curiosity are starting to choke in the ash of her fear then he’ll say something like a little spark of wind to light them back up, he’ll say something like:

“I was hurt, and Beth, well, she was the first face I saw.” Quiet, and then he goes yet quieter. “You can’t know how important that is, the first person you meet when you wake up and it’s all new. A friendly face.” 

Once started, the Doctor can’t seem to stop talking; he’s like a rusty faucet that you have to twist hard to get anything out of, but then all the words shoot out full-blast, and even when he tries to turn it off, still they drip out one by one. And she should just take it, this gift of extra information, take it and not push for more but—

She can’t.

Because there are no windows, and no clocks, and the cell is twenty strides by seventeen strides. There are ten tables and/or counters. Two rows of cabinets. Nine different pathways to take from one end to the other longwise, and twenty-two from the short way from stone wall to the bars, or maybe not because she keeps losing track no matter how carefully she plots them out. Did she go left around the electron microscope last time, or right? Did she already count the path between the first countertop and the broken Keller machine, or is she remembering a previous attempt?

And there’s just something so fascinating about what had happened to him, to his eyes and his face and his whole body (freezing, frozen, trapped in time) the last time she struck home. Josie. _Nothing in this world can hurt her now._ Like getting a glimpse of soft white underbelly. Like feeling solid iron suddenly give under her hands.

It woke up this itch in her mind, all questions rustling and poking and rubbing, multiplying questions scratching under her skin with the whisper of all the things she doesn’t know, and it _itches_ , oh she has to know she has to know she has to—

Twenty-one strides by sixteen strides. When did that change? Do it over again. Twenty strides by nineteen strides. Wait, was she counting length by width or width by length? Have to start all over again. And on and on and on because there is nothing new, because the experiments blur together and the guards blur together and the inside of her mind is starting to feel like the blank sheets of paper in her notebook, blaring white and empty and neverending samesamesame, and _this is her life now_ , this is how it’s going to be always and forever except in those moments when she sticks him with a needle and he flinches ( _beautiful_ ) and her heart leaps into her throat—

His breaths are evening; he’s going to try to go on like this conversation hasn’t even happened. She can’t let him do that.

 **I’ve seen pictures. Bodies have been taken out.** SJ underlines the next word. **Plural.**

Several muscles in his shoulders tighten; he` turns sharply away. Shoves his hands into a box of gears, rummaging through them with much more force and noise than necessary. 

She cannot breathe; her nerves are strung tight as piano wire, she’s tightening him like piano wire and any second now the tuning peg will twist too tight and he’ll snap, the wire will break and lash back, leave a bloody stripe on her skin…

“Only one of those would have been female.” He’s still facing away from her, his hands buried up to the wrists in the box. He’s stopped pretending to look for anything. “He was always very particular about not calling it a skirt.”

She doesn’t understand, but already her writing hand is spitting out **So they brought you a boy once as well, what difference does that**

But he’s already answering the question without even turning around. “We were running—so very, very fast. I wasn’t going to let anyone hurt them, you see. Take anything from them. They were my friends. I told them to take heart, and follow me.”

She remembers him telling her about the crash. Miles of stone, his craft destroyed.

He hadn't said there was anyone with him before.

“I thought travel might broaden the hearts as well as the mind. I thought that away from my people, I might learn courage.” His voice is heavy. “But I was wrong. All I learned was how to run faster, and one day, it was not fast enough.” His fingers trace along the edges of the box. “‘Brave heart, my friends.’ ‘Don’t fret, Josie, I shall be right behind you.’ She never would have left if I hadn’t said that.”

There is a silence, a solid and a tangible thing in the air. It is halfway between the hush of a confessional and the pause before the soldier swung the hammer down on her fingers again.

She breaks it, her pen scratching against the rough paper.

**Why aren’t there any traces of Josie?**

SJ has to tap him on the shoulder (and that sudden dizzy rush of prodding the lion is sweet, harsh, fast, _perfect_ ) to get him to turn around and read it. And _oh,_ magic word, there it is—that look in his eyes.

Lost, and sad, and confused.

She feels a little sick.

“Do you like books?” he asks. 

This is the last thing she expected, and it must show on her face, because his lips curve briefly in a smile.

“I would just assume you enjoy reading, being a newsrunner, but one can never guess with people. I once knew a jockey who couldn’t abide horses, and gluten-intolerant master baker.”

 **How did you know I was a newsrunner?** she demands instead of answering him. First thing you learn from dealing with information is that the one asking the questions is the one holding the power.

He’s far from thrown, though. “It was perfectly obvious, Miss Smith, even if that fool Lethbridge-Stewart hadn’t shown up every fifteen minutes glowering about Miss Shaw’s decision to keep you alive.” There’s almost a glint of pride in his eyes. “I knew it the moment I saw you.”

**That I was in the resistance, yes, but you couldn’t have**

“Oh, but I could,” he cuts her off, peering over her shoulder at the notebook. “They have their diabolical little Dewey decimal system of mutilation, you see. Eyes and ears for captured foreign spies, toes or entire feet for those who try to flee the country. Tongues for officials caught blabbing state secrets. Vocal cords, as you know, for those who talk back to their interrogators. Fingers or hands for the writers in the newsrunning groups. Teeth for—”

**STOP IT**

He stops. Her fingers are pressed against the notebook until they almost as white as the paper below. The strange pale lights of the cell make a buzzing sound that rises like tide in her ears. _Sully. Audrey. Fitzoliver._

“What I don’t understand,” the Doctor continues after a moment, “is why they confined themselves to one hand, especially your non-dominant one.”

**So I could write out my confession.**

Answering questions. She shouldn’t be doing that. She let herself get emotional, let him flip the balance of power back in his favor. She can’t afford to do that. 

“They do love their formalities, don’t they? Can’t execute a man without filling out forms in triplicate.” He steps a little closer to her. “If they operated before they got a confession it would have happened quite early on. You have my respect; you must have been very good at riling them up.”

He makes that last part pointed, startling her gaze up to his.

“I don’t know why you’re trying to do it again,” the Doctor says softly. His eyes are soft too, but behind them is the promise of marble and ice. “But I won’t let you do it to me.”

SJ bites her lip, and then damns herself for the tell.

“I’m sorry,” he says, though not for what. And he does sound sorry, but it’s a lie, everything out of his mouth is a lie, she can’t let herself forget that. Can’t let him win. “Sometimes, I…well. Let’s try that again. Do you like to read?”

She wants to tell him nothing, just to spite him.

“Well, Miss Smith? Afraid I have some dastardly scheme in mind if you confess to liking Milton?”

And wipe that smug half-smile off his face. He thinks he’s so charming. Thinks he can’t lose.

But if she doesn’t answer, she’ll never find out where this line of questioning is going. 

He might even stop answering her questions.

 **Yes, I like to read.**

“What kind of books? Josie, bless her heart, had abominable literary taste. Romance novels, horses.”

 **Christie, Austen, Asimov,** she writes grudgingly. **Keene, Bradbury, Bronte, Sayers.**

He raises his eyebrows. “Do you like any authors whose work hasn’t been banned?”

**The state-sponsored ones are rubbish. And it hardly matters, as I’m not going to get any reading material anytime soon.**

“Oh ye of little faith. Beth’s perfectly reasonable about these things if you approach her in the right way.”

**Oh certainly, next time she’s over and we’re braiding our hair I’ll just ask if she can pop by the library sometime, shall I?**

“I never said anything about you asking her, my dear.”

She looks up at him sharply, then back down at the paper. **I don’t want books.**

“You just said that you—”

 **And now I’m saying I don’t want them!** She slams down the notebook and tries to push past him, but his hand shoots out and seizes her wrist.

“Miss Smith—”

_I won’t let you buy me._

He fumbles his grip for a second. “Miss Smith—” and it’s still pleading for just a second before it goes hard as granite. “I did not dismiss you yet.”

His fingers are a vise around her arm, her pulse hammering against his thumb. 

xxxxx

“You asked to see me?” Sharp, impatient, but also…intrigued? 

If so, it’s the first time SJ’s had anything in common with Shaw; she can’t imagine what the Doctor thinks he’s doing. SJ bends her head further, pretending to be copying figures into her notes. Shifts on the stool so she’s at just the right angle to see both their faces.

“And you came,” the Doctor says, leaning against the bars. “I must have been a terribly good boy lately.”

“Oh, I don’t know about terribly.” The edge of her bite doesn’t exactly soften, but it does go dryer, sardonic. “Those proximity detectors gave an entirely new definition to ‘useless.’”

“Oh dear.” He rubs at his lower lip, sheepish. “Still, it was better than that coolant incident, wasn’t it?”

Shaw laughs once, light and clear. SJ’s head snaps up—the Section Leader is _smiling_. “The poor Brigade Leader…”

“Served him right for pressing the button before we could explain anything.”

Shaw’s stance alters slightly; she leans forward a bit, grasping the bar just below the Doctor’s own grip. Her weight shifts as her left heel rises, tracing up and down the back of her other leg. “You didn’t call me just to talk about old times, Doctor.”

A throaty chuckle. “And why not?”

SJ cannot be seeing this. This makes no sense.

The Doctor reaches out slowly, so slowly, through the bars, and traces a line down Beth’s cheek.

Their eyes are locked on each other.

“I could have you whipped for that,” Shaw says. Challenging. Not pulling away. Breathing just barely faster. “Shot, even.”

“Have I been bad?” the Doctor murmurs. “You need only say the word.”

Shaw’s hand slides up over his on the iron bar. “Feeling nostalgic today, Doctor?”

“Perhaps,” he allows with a hint of a smile.

She runs her hand up his arm, over his shoulder. “Don’t you like the one I picked out for you?”

“Physically impeccable,” he says. Their faces are almost touching. “But not exactly…a meeting of the minds. And…”

“And?” A smirk. Her hand settles at the back of his neck.

“I miss you.”

Beth flinches.

Or does she? It happens so fast, and in the very next second anger flashes in her eyes and her hand fists in the Doctor’s hair, yanking downwards. The Doctor drops to his knees like a puppet, letting Shaw jerk his head back so she can spit in his face. When she lets go, his head lolls forward. He does not rise.

There is a gleam in her eyes, hard and tight. Avid, as she combs through his fair hair with her black-gloved hand.

With a snap of her fingers she summons the guards to her side; they enter the cell and cuff the Doctor, towing him away.

xxxxx

The cell is never completely dark.

Whenever SJ had woken before, the lights from the Doctor’s workspace had always shown through the bed’s curtain, a muted glow. 

But now even with those turned off, there are still the lights from the hallway where the guards walk up and down, up and down.

The Doctor has been gone for two days.

The shard of glass pricks her skin where she’s hidden it under her sleeve.

Either the Doctor’s getting what he wanted with her from Beth Shaw instead, or—that rage on Shaw’s face had been real—he’s dead. For SJ, both of those mean her usefulness is at an end. Soon, someone will come to take her to the execution squads. Or back to The Room.

The shard is her insurance against the latter.

They’ve brought full rations each day, though. If the Doctor is dead, someone hasn’t been informed.

In fact, somewhere in the chain of command, someone doesn’t even know he’s out of his cell.

A weakness?

This is immaterial. She’s not going to have time to investigate, let alone exploit, some potential Achilles’ heel. She needs to end this now, or soon, before they come for her. Count herself lucky for the two days of extra food and the fact that the Doctor had mostly kept his distance, and end it. The sooner she takes matters into her own hands, the more likely she’ll bleed out before the guards notice anything wrong.

But if the Doctor was doing this for her. _Beth’s perfectly reasonable about these things if you approach her in the right way._ Trying to get her to owe him—but people didn’t take those kind of risks just to get you in their debt.

_Not everything is a trap, Miss Smith._

She shifts slightly on the bed, unable to sleep or shut out that paltry ray of light, and the glass bites against her skin again.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm changing the warning from "friendship with overtones of Stockholm Syndrome" to straight-up "Stockholm Syndrome." I really should've done it awhile back, but it took some time to realize that the way the story had played out in my head was not the way it wanted to be written.

_She dreams of Andrea’s house, the ratty patterned sofa by the fireplace, stuffing spilling out. Andy and Sully are there, and they keep hugging her, their jumpers smelling of wool and smoke and turpentine. She keeps trying to say, “We have to go, we have to go, we have to…” but they won’t listen, and she keeps forgetting why (the police) when they finally do and not remembering until they’re no longer paying attention…_

_“Took you long enough to get out, old thing. We were starting to think you’d never find the secret panel behind the Keller machine.”_

_“Don’t call me a thing, Sully.”_

_“And when did you dye your hair?”_

xxxxx

She is no longer inside her body.

She is watching herself, moving around the cell, monitoring the experiments the Doctor left behind.

(Measure the acetate. Note the coagulation level. Decrease the temperature. Turn the dial one-quarter to the right. Light the Bunsen burner.)

The glass in her sleeve feels very far away, background noise. But constant, never-ceasing, the bleeding static of that thought: _Do it. Do it now. Do it. Do it now._

 _In a moment,_ she agrees, and measures the acidity.

(Turn off the Bunsen burner. Turn the dial three-quarters to the right. Increase the temperature. Note the coagulation level. Measure the precipitate.)

She knows what to do but not what the experiments are for. She knows what she has to do but not why she has yet to do it.

_Do it. Do it now. No time to waste. Do it. Do it now._

Is she angry? Is she afraid?

She thinks she would know if she was inside her body.

She sees it out of the corner of her eye, as though it’s already happened, as though it will always happen. Red blood on white tile, and her hands wrench the faucet, and she blinks against the freezing water, and then, finally: the end.

A victory, if a cold one. 

Or at least a draw.

But somehow she doesn’t do it. She wipes down the counter, prepares samples on slides. There are test tubes that should be labeled. There are reactions to be noted. There is a patch of stone to stare at, her movement arrested, because she cannot move, because what is the point of moving, because the stone is there and she is there and there is nothing there, because there is nothing, no point to anything.

But she will do it.

Strange things freeze her. The stone, its outcropping not perfectly symmetrical. The folds of her bedcurtains, like they hide something secret. 

Her own face, caught in a glimpse of stainless steel.

The damage there is limited. In the beginning, because she was being kept in a prison the Red Cross had access to. In the end, for reasons only Section Leader Shaw can say. The guards have left minimal souvenirs. A scar bisecting her left eyebrow. Her nose broken so many times that it is no longer the same shape. 

Sometimes she still gets a ringing in her ears.

The scars on her scalp are mostly hidden by her hair, uneven and patchy. They had threatened to shave it, but never followed through.

It made too good a handle.

(Her hair skims her shoulders, less uneven than it could be. The Doctor had trimmed it when she was brought to him unconscious, the Doctor had—the Doctor had—)

A jagged rune along her throat where unskilled hands took her voice. Her left hand a punch-line she cannot decipher with its missing fingers and the remaining three healed stiff and slightly crooked, a claw. And that is only what can be seen now, what the prison uniform doesn’t hide; she avoids looking at herself in the shower or when she changes, but her memory can call up snapshots, accidental and stark: cigarette burns freckling her thighs, ribs grotesque against her skin like a living skeleton, hash marks along her abdomen where the guards had kept score. And she cannot see but can feel, always, the twisted-together stripes along her back, red mountain ridges slicing through the prisoner identification number inked onto her shoulder blade. 

_No wonder he doesn’t want to touch you._

It’s a stupid thought, illogical and unworthy, and as she shoves it away she feels a spark of anger, as though for a second she is back in her body again.

_Do it. Do it now. It never helps to put things off. You’ll have to do it eventually._

_I will,_ she agrees, and shaking herself away from the reflection, turns the dial a quarter turn to the right, and begins again.

xxxxx

_“Ah, there you are,” says the Doctor. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”_

_“But it’s not fair,” she protests. “I got home. Sully, Andy, tell him!”_

_But they are gone._

_“What did you do to them?”_

_“Nothing in this world can hurt them now.” He is a corpse, a lipstick smear bright against his skull._

xxxxx

The footsteps don’t wake her; the patrols rarely do, these days, though sometimes a jackboot will strike the floor at just the right timbre to snap her awake, certain they’re coming for her. But this time it’s a jangle of keys, and a tune, whistled, jaunty and upbeat. She sits upright, fingers on the glass shard.

The shriek of hinges, and the whistling becomes singing: “Foooorrrr…Casey would waltz with a strawberry blonde, and the band played on…!” 

It is the Doctor’s voice. 

The Doctor has come back. 

A great tide of _something_ sweeps through her—relief? Disbelief? Fear? Her breath has caught in her throat, but her muscles are jelly, as though she has finally let go of holding them tensed and tight and ready.

“He’d glide ‘cross the floor with the girl he adored—watch how you set those down!” Thump, thud. Two boxes, heavy by the sound of them.

“And the band, hmm, hmm…But his brain was so loaded it nearly exploded, the poor girl would shake with alarm…”

He sounds…happy. Happier than she’s ever heard him. Her fingernails cut into her palm as she watches the shadows through the curtain, the guards uncuffing him. _I almost--_

The glass cuts into her palm and she remembers it, shoves it under the pillow.

He has come back, and the world is upside down.

SJ is dizzy with what she almost did.

The guards are locking the door behind them. “He’d ne’er leave the girl with the strawberry curls—”

She slips out from behind the curtain.

“And the band—Miss Smith!” He is beaming. It looks wrong on his face. The skin around his wrists, just below his sleeves, is rubbed raw and red.

She crosses her arms and stays where she is.

“Don’t you want to take a look?” He raps at the side of the cardboard box. 

Damn him, she does. She hugs her arms tighter to her chest, trying to remember where she left her notebook. She wants to ask him where he’s been and what he was thinking and how he can be singing and _why_ he left, why and what does it mean? Is she extraneous now? Is he trying to keep her, or throwing her away? 

“Did you think I was not coming back?”

His voice is soft now, sad and slightly reproving. And she can’t let him pity her, she _can’t_.

She goes towards him, looks into the boxes.

_Books._

There are paperbacks and hardcover and leather-bound and vellum, crisp and new with deckled edges or crumbling and yellowed and fragile. There are well-loved worn corners and dog-eared pages and cracking bindings and ripped covers, pages edged in down-market orange or flaking gold gilt. They are blue and brown and red and green and yellow and black and they smell of ink and vanilla and old shops.

Their titles are set in big blocky letters or flowing elegant scripts, and occasional pictures bloom across the covers: a lighthouse, a rose, a striking snake.

“There are warehouses, you see,” the Doctor is explaining. “All of the confiscated property of those who have been disappeared. Jewelry or silverware or anything obviously valuable is taken immediately to line the pockets of the state, and over the years the employees erode away the remaining baubles and knickknacks. Until all that is left are the leaning towers and tumbling hills of forbidden literature, gathering dust as they wait for the proper paperwork to be ground through bureaucratic gears so they can be fed into an incinerator.”

The dim light glints off glossy covers. Her mouth is watering. She wants to reach out and touch the lighthouse—trace her fingers over the lines of the illustration and the lines of the title and the smoothness of the paper—more than she wants to breathe.

“I tried to choose ones that you would like, but Beth could only give me fifteen minutes; I’m afraid that towards the end I was just chucking them in there.”

She tears her gaze away from the box; makes sure her hands are not shaking as she fetches her notebook from beneath her bed.

 **So you got to see the sky.** She makes it an accusation with the sharp angles of her letters and the stab of her pen.

“Ah, no.” He looks at his hands. “A great deal too many hallways, actually. The nearest warehouse is only a mile or so up.” He gestures towards the boxes. “Go on then, take one.”

A book—words, story, a world carrying her outside this cell, words to light up her mind and break down the walls and take all the crushing weight of miles and miles of rock, even if only for a moment…

But taking one would be a surrender, and she _can’t_.

**I didn’t ask you to do this for me.**

“It was nothing.” He becomes suddenly fascinated with a loose thread at the end of his sleeve. “Without Alistair egging her on, Beth’s tastes are fairly conventional.”

She glances down at the thin red lines around his wrists, and his mouth twists wryly. “I did say ‘fairly,’ not ‘completely.’”

She wants to hit him. She wants to yell, _I thought you were dead._ She wants to yell, _I thought it was my fault_. She wants to be able to yell at all. 

**I didn’t ask you to do this for me** she repeats, underlining it this time. There are a dozen meanings she needs to cram into just those nine words, because anything more will give him the wrong idea. 

But he’s not looking. “Casey would waltz with a strawberry blonde…” he half-hums, half-sings. A flash of mischief darts through his eyes, and he lowers his voice, conspiratorial. “She’s not a real brunette, you know.” He waggles his eyebrows. _“Ginger.”_

As if this is all some sort of joke, as though they are chums, as though his girlfriend hadn’t stood in the corner of The Room smoking a cigarette, her voice cool and bored as though she were watching some sub-par state television show for lack of anything better to do: _‘Randall, wash up. Anderson, your turn.’_

 **So you’re trying gifts now. It didn’t work for the soldiers at Eastchester and it isn’t going to work here for you.** She makes each letter cold and neat and evenly formed, before she slams the open notebook down on the counter and stalks over to the armchair, curling away from him and into herself, tightening her arms around her knees and pressing her nails into her palms.

There are a few silent seconds as he reads her message, and then several slow deliberate steps until she can feel his presence behind her like a wall.

“Perhaps you could clarify exactly what you are angry about. Is it because you believe this is a ploy to get you to owe me, because I left you alone, or because you suspect that I might have enjoyed myself?”

She is on her feet, yanking his arm and scrawling into his skin **I didn’t ask you to do this for me you went off with some stupid plan I didn’t even know that could have gotten you KILLED**. Her blood is pounding in her ears. _You don’t get to decide what I need, this doesn’t make it right, this doesn’t make you good, this doesn’t make us friends._

“Were you concerned?” He twists his arm suddenly so that she loses her grip; snags her wrist and hauls her close, his other arm encircling her and trapping her tight against him. His tone has gone dry and mocking. His eyes blue ice. “Why, Miss Smith, I didn’t know you cared.”

 **I couldn’t care less if they roasted you on a slow spit** she retorts, nails scraping across the cotton of his shirt. **But if they kill you then they don’t need me anymore and I DIE and I didn’t know where you were and**

And she’s said too much because a light goes off in his eyes and he shifts his grip to both wrists, wrenches them over her head. Her sleeves slide down almost to the elbow and she can feel his eyes on her skin, hunting for evidence. There are no cuts but sometimes when the glass bit in it had drawn blood, leaving behind scabs like pinpricks and stars, and if he guesses…

At last he lets out a breath like he’s satisfied and lets go of her wrists; she clasps them to her chest and tries to massage life back into them and her hands. She tries to move away but then his hand is on her shoulder. 

“Whatever you were thinking…that is not the answer. That is never the answer. I forbid it.”

She tries to yank his hand off her; he is stone. **Do you think if you keep me alive it will undo all the murders you’ve committed?**

A hit, a palpable hit. He takes a deep breath, closing and then reopening his eyes. “That is not the whole story and you know it.”

But what matters is that in those few seconds, he’s loosened his grip. 

She slips out of his grasp and dives back into the refuge behind the curtain, curling up tight and covering her head and waiting, trembling, more than half-expecting that this uncertain, unspoken promise will also be broken. She hears his steps, skidding to a halt on the concrete floor. Feels the puff of air as his outstretched hand slaps against the hanging fabric.

But he does not pull it aside, and he does not proceed any further. It sounds as though he actually backs up a few steps.

She raises the shelter of her arms from around her head, and watches his shadow, warily.

Eventually, he speaks.

“I know that this is not a good life,” he says. “Here—with me. But it is …a _life_ , Miss Smith.” He pauses.

“Not every moment in it has to be terrible.”

xxxxx

_‘You’re dead.’ She’s crying. They’re trying to hug her. ‘You’re all dead, this isn’t real, so stop this, it isn’t fair…’_

The shriek of the pipes wakes her, and her hands are shielding her head before the rustle of the plastic separator and splatter of water confirm that it is only the Doctor, taking a shower. He takes more showers now, at odd, random intervals—the middle of a night, halfway through an experiment, or throwing down his fork before he’s taken a bite of his meal.

The shadow of the boxes on the counter looms across her bed-curtain, an accusation.

xxxxx

_It’s too much, she’s weak and she’s desperate and she needs it more than anything, the relief of sweet unfolding words and escape and thoughts not her own, and she falls on the books like a starving animal._

_But when she opens the first one the words swim in front of her eyes, and the second, and the third—the letters are twisted and broken and unfamiliar,_ she has forgotten how to read—

She wakes sobs catching in her throat, silent tears streaming down her face. She scrubs them away and goes to assist the Doctor with his experiments. He does not comment on her red eyes and puffy eyelids. He does not comment on anything at all.

He does not even look at her.

xxxxx

_The weight on top of her and heavy and never-ending and no reprieve, every reprieve will only be a lie, and the heavy weight pressing down on top of her and she is being ripped apart and she cannot scream, and every reprieve will only be a cruel chance for a tiny blossom of hope to grow (she tells it not to grow, she tells it) only to be crushed again by the weight and inescapable and they grunt like pigs, sweating, and the Section Leader just watches, smoke from her cigarette curling to the ceiling, and she can’t breathe there is no air this is her life forever and ever until she dies, why can’t she die, why can’t she breathe—_

She wakes with her body locked rigid to the bed, frozen and solid and unyielding to her commands as the air presses down against her, as her panic echoes inside her skull along with a great rushing and buzzing until she remembers Sully saying _sleep paralysis_ and _don’t doze on your back with the light on, old thing, you’re just asking for trouble_. Her vision swimming in and out of focus, she concentrates on moving just her right foot, just a little, and finally it twitches, and the whole rest of her body comes unlocked, undone, and she hauls herself up into a sitting position, gasping for breath.

There is the sudden clinking sound of the Doctor puttering with equipment at the counter—has he been standing still and silent and listening, this entire time, to her shifting struggling breathing patterns, to the straining stillness of her body against the sheets? Or has she only just calmed enough to notice sounds outside herself?

Could he have helped her?

Did he want to?

Did he do this to her in the first place?

xxxxx

He never would have discovered the glass shard if she hadn’t tried to throw it away.

Under the pillow is probably the safest place she could have been keeping it—he has rifled through her clothes, and pressed into her mind, but he will not go past the bed-curtain if she has shut it—but it doesn’t feel safe, covered only by a bit of cloth from the Doctor’s ice-cold eyes.

He’s working on his pet project—the morning after her bout with sleep paralysis she emerged to find it half built, and smoking, and he hasn’t asked her to hold one gear or fetch one wrench or take down one reading for it. Hasn’t even let her go near it; throws a cloth over it and shoves it into the corner as soon as she steps up next to him. Barks an order for another experiment if she happens to wander—and all right, she does not always just ‘happen’ to wander—close to the tarpaulin-covered monstrosity. And as long as she stays her distance, it’s like he’s in another world.

Acceptable risk.

And then his hand closes around her wrist as the shard clinks down.

“We have had this discussion, Miss Smith.”

 **I WAS THROWING IT AWAY,** she tries with her left hand (her right is being squeezed so hard she cannot let go of the glass), clumsy and uncoordinated, _I wasn’t taking it_ is how she wants to finish but he grabs her other wrist as well, gagging her.

And everything just—he _gags_ her, iron grip around her wrists, glass slicing into thumb, closetooclose up against her _she can’t breathe_ —and everything just goes white and sparking and—

She head-butts him.

It knocks the air out of his lungs and he stumbles back but he doesn’t let go and she bites him, hard, and twists, and bites again harder and hand free she scratches and he is trying to grab her, trying to pin her down and she thrashes away with everything she can, her feet kicking against him like a stone wall and tears burning tracks down her face and he knocks her to the ground and he is stronger and she is smaller and she struggles, trying to knee him but he evades, she is struggling again and it is just as useless but she has to she can’t breathe she has to—

“What do you want?” He is breathless, trying to shout. “I have given you everything I can, what do you—”

He grabs her arm, she uses the forward momentum and against his neck:

**just admit you want to hurt me**

He lets go like magic.

She scuttles backwards, sobbing. The glass, stained red, falls to the floor.

His face is a parody of astonishment.

“I…don’t.” 

She lunges forward, hands fisting in the folds of his shirt. 

**JUST ADMIT IT**

She is shaking to be so near him, his body a solid threat on the concrete floor, and she is terrified that he might admit it but she is furious that he will not, and she thinks wildly that if he gives her this one piece of honesty she will never ask for another thing, for just this one thing she will surrender and give in and stop fighting, she is so tired of fighting and if he won’t let her die then he can give her this one thing…

“What is the point, Miss Smith?” He does not move. “If you will believe it regardless of what I say.” 

**it’s what I want**

“All right.” He slumps, his weight straining against the fabric she is still clenching in her hands. “I want to hurt you.”

He cheats by making the words flat and emotionless, but he’s done what she asked and so she lets go.

They are both still for several long moments, SJ counting off the seconds in her head: one, two, three, four, five, six. Watching the floor, the unchanging chipped and pockmarked concrete. Then the Doctor rocks forward, steadies himself on his ankles beside her.

“A dragon is not a vampire, Miss Smith, nor is it a sea monster or a minotaur or a demon. Not all monsters are the same, and it is a mistake to treat them as such.”

 _Funny they all demand the sacrifice of a maiden,_ she thinks but does not say. Her anger sated, her body is remembering the full taste of fear, the way it lays heavy on the tongue and freezes the brain and electrifies the spine and spreads out into every part of you. He’s going to hurt her now, she made him admit it and he’s going to hurt her so badly…

After awhile he hauls himself to his feet. “Stay there.”

Where else is she going to go?

He fetches a cloth and cleans the blood from her hand, tapes a bandage into place.

“I thought—” He clears his throat. She keeps looking at the floor. “I thought it would be different, this time. You’ve known the world, and suffering. But humans—well, I suppose you’re not made for this.” He runs his thumb over the pad of her palm. “I suppose no one is.”

 **What are you?** she asks on the back of his hand. She doesn’t mean to. It just happens.

“Ever the newsrunner.” He curls her fingers inward, cups the loose fist in his hands. Her hand is so small in his hand; he looms over her. “I told you once, my dear—I’m the dragon.”

She feels hollowed-out, as though the torrent of rage and pain—of only minutes ago, it feels unreal—has scoured her and left her nearly empty. Unreal herself. All that is left is the sickly churning of fear in her stomach. **And then I suppose I’m the princess?**

“No.” He shakes his head. “No, I think not. Josie, yes, she was a princess. And Beth—a tiger, or perhaps a _karura_ …creature from Japanese Hindu-Buddhist mythology,” he clarifies. “But you…a bird with a broken wing, shot and taken to the dragon’s cave as an offering.”

**And what does a dragon want with a bird?**

“Didn’t you already tell me?”

He traces around the edges of her bandage, lightly, but just a hair’s breadth away from pushing hard enough to sting. Her body tenses waiting for him to push hard enough to sting.

“You’re not allowed to leave me. You’re not. When I’m alone—“

Perhaps he would go on, but there is the click of a door opening, and their heads both snap in its direction, towards the door and the guards snapping to attention.

And the Brigade Leader.

The Doctor shifts, puts himself in front of SJ.

Oh, she _hates_ that pulse of gratitude that blooms in her throat.

The Brigade Leader clouts one of the guards for a sloppy salute, and then strolls towards the cell, his entourage following him. He raises an eyebrow at their positions. “Playing in the dirt, Doctor?”

“No, but now that you’re here, there’s plenty of filth to spread around.”

SJ can see his left hand, behind him, shaking.

“I don’t appreciate your tone.”

“And yet you continually make the trip down here to subject yourself to it. What from this can we conclude about the military mind?”

“Keep talking, Doctor. As it is, you’re only being disciplined for three-quarters of your tracker drones failing within their first week. I’d be only too happy to take you to task for your other failings.”

“You always are,” the Doctor mutters. He gets to his feet.

He has shoved both hands into his pockets, the muscles in his shoulders strung tight.

He pauses only once, right at the door. Darts a glance toward the piece of bloodied glass, then towards SJ. 

She shakes her head.

It’s so quick that perhaps it doesn’t happen, perhaps she only imagines the relief in his eyes before he turns back, before they take him away. He doesn’t look back the entire march down the hall.

Her hands are trembling as she picks up the piece of glass and throws it away. She is cold. She doesn’t know why she made that promise.

Does a headshake count as a promise?

Did he even ask her for one?

Why would a dragon need a promise from its meal?

Perhaps she made it because he has not really answered any of her questions.

And she still has so many more.

xxxxx

She sleeps—eventually, barely— and dreams.

 _He’s gone and she doesn’t have to worry what he thinks, what he infers, what obligations will bind him to her, and so she buries her hands in the box and comes up with an armload of books,_ Frankenstein _and_ Wuthering Heights _and_ The Collected Works of Emily Dickinson _and she bites into them, the paper like marchpane and the ink like licorice, the binding glue thick and starchy and slightly bitter but still she wolfs it down, pages ripping and covers cracking and the words—‘soul’ and ‘moor’ and ‘monstrosity’ and—melt against her fingers like chocolate and leave caramel smears all down her cheeks, and she can hear the Doctor scream not so far away and she has to help him (if only to help herself), she knows that, but the books, the books, the_ books _, she is so hungry and she shoves one crumpled page down her throat after another, chewing and swallowing and chewing and swallowing (and the Doctor screams, and she sobs, chewing and swallowing), her hunger unending, her tongue and her teeth working furiously to devour every sweet scrap, every mouthful, every shred…_

xxxxx

She’s pacing back and forth in the cell when the door at the end of the hall clicks open again. Two guards, half-dragging the Doctor—he’s not resisting as much as his legs don’t seem to be obeying him. SJ barely makes halfway across the room before they throw him in, and he pitches forward and she can already hear the crack his skull is going to make on the floor—

She catches him, more or less. He doesn’t brake and it’s like being hit by a lorry; his chest collides with her face and her nostrils flare at the salt scent of blood and sweat and sex. The impact drives her down to her knees, skin scraping against rough concrete, his hands tightening around her shoulders as he tries not to tumble forward or backward or to the side; he can’t seem to locate his center of gravity, and every few seconds a spasm shudders through him. His weight is pushing her down but she can’t let herself notice his weight pushing her down or she is going to run and he is going to fall, so she tries to notice everything else (each thing with a flash like a camera going off): his eyes, wild and rotating in their sockets, a bruise blooming vivid purple around his left eyelid; his shirt, ripped at the collar, the white cloth stiff with dried fluids, stained red and yellow and— His mouth red and swollen and the imprint, deep, of his teeth in his bottom lip; his skin sticky to the touch and his breathing harsh and his hair alternately wild and matted and a drop of sweat cutting a line from his hair down to his cheekbone and hovering on the edge of his jaw…

“I’m…quite fine,” each word like he has to find it and take hold of it and push it through his throat. “Leave…don’t, I just—”

He pushes himself up onto his feet, swaying alarmingly for a second before lurching forward. He makes it to the shower and yanks the curtain shut. The pipes squeal, the water hisses and spits from the showerhead.

SJ collects herself, dusts herself off. She clears a path from the shower to the bed, and she opens the bed-curtain, and she sits in the chair, and she gets up and paces back and forth and then in a circle and then in a line, her gaze snapping back towards the shower every time she hears a thump or a grunt or a muffled swear. She doesn’t think about weight pressing her down, or bloodstains or other stains or the acrid smell of his sweat or his (familiar) limp or the way (unfamiliar) his eyes had looked as though they were fighting to see her, to focus on anything real—

From the shower there is a crash, and a cry of pain.

SJ freezes. Waits.

There is only the sound of water hitting tile.

If he fell…

She hurries to the shower, raps on the wall next to it.

No response.

If he fell, if he hit his head—she raps again, harder.

A groan.

Her heart starts beating again.

She gets her notebook, writes **Are you hurt?** Tears out the page and slips her hand through the curtain, just out of range of the water.

The Doctor doesn’t take it. 

She can’t hear any more groaning, and she can’t hear his breathing over the sound of the water. She raps against the wall again, louder, and rustles the paper, and nothing, no sound from the Doctor, she is choking on her useless vocal cords—

Hesitant, she pushes the plastic curtain aside.

“No!” The Doctor cowers away from the light and from her, splashing the standing water, shielding himself with his hands. He is huddled naked in one corner, his sopping clothes wadded in another. Water drops bounce off and slide across the bruises on his chest, the caked-on dirt and blood and cum caught in its hair. His eyes are glazed, pupils dilated so that they almost swallow the blue around them; something invisible catches his gaze and he swats the air before he sees her again and then he shies away again, back against the wall, head bent, hands protecting his groin. “Please, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, it was a mistake, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have, I’m sorry…”

He’s—no, it’s the water, it has to be…no. He is.

He’s crying.

Naked and vulnerable and bleeding and curled in the corner like a little boy hiding from nightmares, all angles and soft spots and struggling weakness, crying in a helpless, hopeless way at the light and the water and the invisible monsters assailing him.

SJ tries to fit this picture into her mind, tries to make it fit into reality.

The Doctor is powerless. She is in control. She could do anything to him that she wants, anything at all.

He whimpers.

She can’t just leave him like this.

SJ turns off the faucet, stepping into the stall and crouching next to him. There’s rather too little room and her knee bumps against his side; he flinches. “I’m sorry, I forgot, I was trying, please don’t, I won’t active the frequency, I’m sorry, Beth, I’m sorry—”

 **NOT BETH** she traces slowly and deliberately along his arm. Can he concentrate enough to understand, or is he too disoriented? **SJ SMITH**

_Sarah?_

They both realize at the same second that he hadn’t spoken out loud.

She tries to back away but he lunges up, his hands bruising-tight around her arms, _don’t tell DON’T TELL DON’T TELL THEY’LL MAKE ME_ and then pictures slam through her head, interrogation rooms and captives chained down and looking down at the captives (through the Doctor’s eyes) _HURT THEM I DON’T WANT TO DON’T TELL PLEASE YOU CAN’T PLEASE_

 _I won’t_ , she tries to send, but it’s a whisper drowning in the hurricane of words and memories/fears/imaginings and waves of terror buffeting her, he is a storm and he is drowning her, she is drowning in him, **I WON’T** she scrapes against his chest but he won’t stop sending the words and the pictures and the feelings and so all she can do is hold on…

And then one of the pictures has a scrap of blue—someone’s eyes? a piece of cloth? it goes by so fast—and she thinks _sky_ and the shape of the word or the memory must snag something in his thoughts, because he pauses.

 _Sky_ she thinks again, and she tries to send _blue_ and the feeling of grass tickling your back and the calm of the wind. _Calm_ she sends as she is shaking, as her heart is pounding her ears. _I won’t ever tell, I promise I won’t._

He stills, and she feels his presence slip from her mind as he lets go of her arms.

“Sorry,” he whispers.

Drops of water glisten on the tips of his eyelashes.

She runs her hand through his hair, trying to send the feelings of _calm_ and _safe_. It seems to work; he turns his face into her hand like a pet or a small child.

_What did they do to you?_

“Beth could’ve been a brilliant scientist,” he says, making her jump. So he heard that too. Or did he? He isn’t looking at her; his eyes are trying and failing to focus somewhere above him, in the air. “Never forgave me for that. Showing her that.”

The soap is circling the drain, the washcloth is wadded into a ball. She takes them both, suds up the fabric, and begins to wash his chest.

He cringes but he doesn’t lash out, and so she keeps going. Keeps her movements brisk and efficient. His body is just a fact and her hands are just a fact, impersonal and objective. This is the only tenderness she can show him, that she is here to do a job, and not to hurt him. 

She scrubs his chest and his arms—she finds injection sites on both the left and right. _Brilliant scientific mind_ and she remembers cigarette smoke rising into the air and bile rises in her throat; she chokes it back down and keeps going.

He stops flinching after awhile and holds still for her ministrations. She works her way through his tangled hair, trying to avoid the bruises on his scalp. Keeps her hands steady as she moves up his legs with the washcloth, but there’s no resistance when she reaches his thighs and moves the cloth between them. He just turns his head away from her, towards the wall; shuts his eyes.

She goes as quickly as she can.

It takes a few nudges for him to get the hint, but he leans forward so that she can wash his back. There’s a pattern of newer red welts over the tangled mass of thin white stripes; he hisses when the soap hits an open wounds. 

_She is kneeling by the edge of the shower, cradling the new girl. The bloody stripes on the girl’s back tint the water rosy red as she combs through her dark hair, trimming away the clumps where the blood has matted too thick to save. One clump at the back of the neck comes away with a large scab and blood gushes forth; the girl whimpers in her sleep, and stirs. She presses the wound shut, fumbles for her needle and thread, sings the low soft words that will send the girl to sleep and keep her safe from all the pain…_

The memory slips from her mind, or she slips from the memory, and she is back in the present, her hand against the Doctor’s back. 

“Sorry,” he whispers again.

She swallows, hand shaking. It had been so sudden, and so real, and she hadn’t questioned it for a second. She had been him, watching her. He could do that.

“I…I didn’t mean to,” he says. “The touch, and—all the stars are connected, and they spark blue—”

She pats his shoulder, an awkward hitting motion three times. She can’t think about this now. For now, don’t think, just do.

The rest goes quickly. A light rinse from the showerhead, and then she towels him off. Keeps the touch brisk, business-like, utilitarian. Wraps the towel around him and guides him to bed, tucking the blanket over him and pulling the curtain closed.

And she’s done.

SJ tries to curl up in the armchair, but there are too many thoughts clamoring to be let out and bounce around her head. _He just reached inside my head. He’s broken. He’s always been able to do that. The pattern of the bruise on his shoulder. He could just reach into my head and do anything he wants. Blood between his legs. They took him and they hurt him. ‘You’re not allowed to leave me.’_

She remembers his wet clothes and leaps up, glad of the distraction, of the sensation of moving through space and getting things done. She retrieves them from the shower, washing them as best she can before ringing them out and rigging them up on a bit of wire over the Bunsen burner. There’s nothing she can do about the rips; she never learned to sew.

That was always Sully’s job.

_He kept saying sorry. He didn’t hit me when the soap got into the cuts. He shouldn’t sleep if he’s had a concussion—did he have a concussion or was the disorientation only from the drugs, I don’t know how to do this, oh Sully why aren’t you here—_

She sees the mattress dip out of the corner of her eyes, the curtains shake just a fraction. The low groan of old bedsprings cannot entirely cover up the Doctor’s whimper.

No, she’s watching the flame of the Bunsen burner dry his clothes, she can’t check on him. She doesn’t need to check on him. She’s done all she can and if that’s not enough, well—

SJ switches off the Bunsen burner and goes to check on him.

She pulls aside the curtain slowly so as not to startle him. His eyes are closed, but his body is anything but peaceful, curled in on himself like a pulled-tight knot, shivering so hard that he shakes the bed again. His teeth chattering.

His blanket, clutched so tight around his shoulders.

She casts about the cell for something to use as a water bottle—there are flasks she can stopper, but she will have to heat the water and that will take time—

She does know one thing that is warm.

She remembers his voice: _Not everything is a trap, Miss Smith._

Perhaps it is time to put that to the test.

Acceptable risk?

The Doctor makes a low, tortured sound in the back of his throat, and shivers harder.

SJ touches her hand to his cheek, lightly; he leans into it like a cat. He is freezing, even more so than usual; she half-expects him to melt against her palm.

_'I know that this is not a good life,' he had said. 'Here—with me. But it is …a life, Miss Smith._

_'Not every moment of it has to be terrible.'_

She makes her choice.

His skin is ice cold all over and damp and his eyes snap open and he flinches away at first when she slips under the blankets with him, but when she does nothing more than put her arms loosely around him and hold him against her, the tension eases from his body. His eyes droop closed. He drapes one long arm over her, and it’s—she has to bite back her first reaction, and not panic, and remind herself that he’s incapacitated and she can get out any time (probably) and this was her idea and he’s holding still for now so she can handle this, she can.

And after that, it’s…not terrible. She thinks perhaps her brain simply can’t comprehend what she’s done. And something about another body, still and in relation to her body…she is anchored. A body, breathing next to another body, and they both exist, they’re both alive.

She should be frightened, she thinks. Only hours ago, she was. Yet all she feels is…aware. Of the rise of his chest, the strange rhythm of his heartbeat, the angle of the light through the gap in the curtains.

He is so fragile after all, and he is the only thing she has left.

xxxxx

_She is back in The Room, but the door is open and she walks out. Yet the hallway keeps leading back to The Room, no matter how many times she leaves, and she hears voices approaching, and so she turns herself invisible and drifts through a wall and now she is in a great auditorium, where men in high collared robes stand high on pedestals. They face her, frowning, and she can’t understand their voices but the understanding is dancing on the edges of her mind, they are voices like circles and starlight and wind-chimes and_

_GET OUT_

_says the dream itself, says the voice of everything that makes up the dream, the screams of The Room and the edge of the gleaming blades and silver leaves that dance along the floor and the eyes of the judges. The wind is howling it as it picks up, the leaves are rustling, the cold and uncaring lines of the walls creak and groan and threaten to cave in._

_GET OUT GET OUT GET_

xxxxx

_OUT_

And she’s out, jarred, the Doctor shuddering again beside her, his lips moving and muttering in delirious fervor. 

She finds a memory of warmth, _hot cider and woolen coats and Andrea’s fire blazing fierce and bright_ , and sends it to him, stroking her hand up and down his back until he is again sleeping peacefully.

She watches him, and all of her questions burn like a banked fire.

xxxxx

SJ is awake for most of the rest of the night, dozing only for a few minutes at a time. So she’s thrown for a moment when she blinks her eyes open in the early hours of the morning, and the Doctor’s blue ones are already staring back. 

“Ah,” he says. “Hello. I was just working out how to disentangle myself without waking you.”

She studies him, her heart-rate slowing back down. A worry-line wrinkles his brow, but his eyes are alert and clear and he isn’t having any trouble focusing them on her—until he notices her noticing that, and then he averts them. His right arm hangs heavy and tense on top of her, his hand as stiff and still as he can make it as it, hovering awkwardly between her shoulder blades. At some point during the night his left arm has been trapped beneath her head; it twitches.

SJ raises her head; he removes his arm.

“Thank you.” The Doctor makes a movement as if to get up before remembering that he is naked. He tucks the blanket down between them instead. He looks at the blanket instead of her. “Did—I didn’t make you…do anything, did I?”

She shakes her head.

“Ah. Good.” He takes a deep breath. “I’m afraid it’s all rather a blur. Beth was…not inclined to follow the scientific method and limit herself to one independent variable.” He tries to smile, but it’s a bit weak. Offers her his left hand, palm up. “I don’t suppose you could tell me what happened, could you? After the shower? I remember…parts of that.”

**You were cold**

“I was…”

 **shivering** she clarifies. **You couldn’t sleep**

“A side-effect from one of the drug combinations, perhaps…” But he’s not even listening to himself, and he trails off. He is staring at her, his brow creased. “I couldn’t sleep, and I was shivering, so you got into bed with me. Of your own free will.”

She shrugs. **you were cold** she repeats stubbornly. Crosses her arms and juts her jaw.

His eyes are bright. He wipes them with the back of his hand. “I don’t believe I will ever understand humans.”

His voice is rough and husky and she still can’t really believe that he can cry, so to avoid seeing any evidence of it she rolls onto her back and stares at the ceiling.

A few deep breaths seem to be all he needs, however, as his next words come out much more carefully light and controlled. “I suppose I should find out where my clothing ended up. You might as well have a bit of a lie-in—I can’t imagine you got a great deal of sleep last night.”

He shuts the curtain behind him and she rolls onto her side. The bed is soft and he is right, she didn’t get much sleep, but somehow she doesn’t feel tired. She watches his silhouette, listens to the small sounds of his movement: bare feet on concrete, the twang of wire as he fetches down his clothes, the shuffling and clinking as he moves about papers and bits of mechanical debris.

After a while, the shuffling and clinking becomes louder and more frequent, his footsteps slapping an urgent tempo as he moves from one area of the cell to another, metal cupboards banging open, stacks of equipment being upended with a crash—

 _He’s searching for something._ And just as SJ realizes this, the noises cease.

She gets up.

The Doctor’s just finished setting everything up on the counter. Her notebook, her pen, and several other biros he must have scared up from around the cell, their caps not just black but red and green and blue. A thin manila folder, labeled ‘Facial Recognition Software—Phase Three—Test Results (Invalid).’ And a small package, no larger than her fist. It’s wrapped in plain brown paper that someone had tried to gussy up with red marker doodles of holly leaves and daisies.

He pushes the folder across the counter towards her. “You asked about Josie. Awhile back. They took everything of hers when she left, but they missed…”

Pictures. Rows and rows of pictures. Head shots, overlaid with bright green circles around the faces and meaningless figures typed in a row below the chin. ‘Res 55% Fade 34% Acc 86%.’ But SJ barely notices those, compared to Josie.

Josie had been pale and blonde and pretty, with a pixie nose and sea-green eyes. In the first row of photos her face was carefully blank and expressionless, but halfway through the second row her wide mouth had broken into a smile, and by the third she had been laughing and pulling silly faces.

“Her full name was Josephine Grant,” the Doctor says.

SJ looks up sharply.

He nods. “Yes, those Grants.”

She starts to reach for her notebook, but he anticipates her question. “A princess grows up in a fairytale palace, knowing neither want nor sorrow, and she naturally expects the rest of the world to be the same. And when, slipping out of the palace in search of adventure, she finds that this is not the case—well. She had the temerity—and the ignorance—to challenge her uncle about his crowd pacification techniques.” 

**The Sedition Act?**

The Doctor gives a bitter smile. “To his credit, the man would’ve hushed it up if he could. But Josie’d called him out in public, in front of ally and enemy alike. Oh, he didn’t entirely throw her to the wolves—I’m sure you're aware the Sedition Act is supposed to carry a death sentence?”

SJ nods.

“His enemies liked that reprieve none too well, naturally, so they settled for maneuvering to get her assigned as my new assistant. Too many state secrets pass through this cell for her to ever be set free, and even then the rumor mill was busy churning out the type of stories about me that you’d evidently heard. Josie hadn’t, of course—so her escorts made a point of telling her all of them the night before they turned her over to me. You should’ve seen her—I could have breathed fire and the poor girl wouldn’t have been surprised. She was terrified.”

**But she came around eventually?**

That gets a genuine smile, his eyes lighting on a memory she can’t see. “If one can call two hours ‘eventually,’ yes. She was terribly trusting then.”

And something about the ‘then’ wipes the smile from his face; he props it back up but it’s forced. He pushes the box across the table. “I only just remembered that I hadn’t—that we hadn’t the chance to—Josie adored holidays, especially Christmas. Even here, where we could hardly have a seven course banquet or a thirteen foot fir tree decked out in real gold and rubies. I’d cobble together some trinket for her out of spare parts; she’d have something smuggled in from the outside. She still had her family’s pull; she could get things, provided they were small and she didn’t mind waiting. She’d get them months ahead of time, and hide them so I wouldn’t be tempted to take a peek—every few weeks she’d become convinced that I’d discovered them and hide them somewhere else. A few times I even had.”

The Doctor nods towards the box. “I thought, perhaps…you’d like to share?”

SJ unpeels the tape as carefully as she can; it seems like sacrilege to tear the jaunty leaves and flowers scrawled with more enthusiasm than skill. She opens the box and the scent hits her, sugar and butter and spice and her mouth is watering before she can even identify the smell— She holds the open box out for the Doctor to see.

It holds a candy bar.

The Doctor takes it, unwraps the golden foil and breaks the bar in half. He gives SJ the slightly bigger piece. 

She touches the tip of her tongue to the very edge, and it’s enough to know instantly that the bit about Josie’s being one of _those_ Grants was completely true. This is real chocolate, rich and creamy and bittersweet, not that cheap carob imitation that had been trotted out three times a year at Eastchester. The taste blooms on her tongue like sunrise. The Doctor has already popped his half into his mouth and is licking his fingers, but SJ can’t just eat this all at once, she can’t, it’d be like destroying a _painting—_

He hands her the foil. “You can wrap it up if you like. Keep it under your pillow.”

She does so, grabbing a book out of a box at random on her way. She very pointedly places it under her pillow as well.

The Doctor pretends not to see, but he is smiling as he sets up the first experiment of the day.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As always, Doctor Who does not belong to me, and this time neither does the first story SJ reads, H.P. Lovecraft's "Azathoth."  
>   
> This chapter was getting really long, so I just cut it off at an appropriate point. The next chapter may be a bit shorter because of that.

They are both more careful for the rest of that day, the folder with Josie’s pictures lying closed on the counter and the book under SJ’s pillow both tangible presences burning bright at the back of their minds. They take care not to crowd each other: SJ stands a step back when taking notation, the Doctor circles her a little more widely when in search of a mislaid tool. 

They are also more daring: when the rations arrive the Doctor places her share of bread directly into SJ’s hand instead of putting it onto the plate, and she takes it from his hand instead of shying away, and they both think nothing of it. Until a few seconds later, when they glance swiftly at each other, and then look away and pretend that nothing has happened, nothing has changed.

Everything has changed.

It’s a busywork day, nothing new or strenuous, but even so the Doctor tires quickly. He does his best to disguise it by creating tasks for which he needs to sit still for some time, watching a chemical reaction or waiting for results. But even so, SJ sees. He is betrayed by small things: a flinch, a twist of his mouth, an intake of breath sharper than it should be.

Startling, to realize how well she can read him. As though she’s learned another language in her sleep.

He does attempt to resume work on one of the larger projects, but when she sees him deliberately toggle the firing pin so that it doesn’t slot in properly, she lays a hand on his arm to stop him. Shakes her head.

**Not today.**

He looks startled, and then curious, and then almost pleased—and she lets go and walks swiftly to the other side of the room, even though she doesn’t have a good reason for doing so. If they realize what he’s doing they’ll take him away again and she doesn’t know if he can survive that, not so soon. And his survival is tied to hers, so there.

That’s all. 

xxxxx

When the last of the busywork is done, the Doctor starts teaching her to sign.

At first he wants to teach her Morse code, but when she raps out a perfect **I was a newsrunner, remember?** with her knuckles, he laughs and switches tracks seamlessly. They go through simple phrases, and the alphabet, and start touching on the grammar.

“Not entirely modern,” he says, somewhat shamefaced. “I’m afraid I’m only really familiar with the version that was around in the sixteenth century.”

As if she’s ever likely to be embarrassed by not knowing proper British Sign Language. As if she’s likely to speak it to anyone besides him, for the rest of her life.

But she appreciates the gesture, this sharing and this—what, exactly? Apology, for the way he grabbed her hands before, and gagged her? Another attempt at repayment, for taking care of him? A bargain: let him have these moments, close to her, correcting the shapes of her hands, adjusting shapes to compensate for her missing fingers, and in return he lengthens the leash, teaches her how to talk to him without having to come close?

She knows one thing: it’s not a trick. She’s known that for a long time now, about a lot of the things he does. But there’s knowing and then there’s _believing,_ and belief is a commitment and a risk and utterly terrifying. 

Because if she’s wrong to believe him, if it _is_ a trick (it might be, it might be) in spite of all the evidence piling up in his favor (it doesn’t matter how much evidence there is if it all turns out to be wrong), if she trusts one more wrong person—

“More of a sweeping motion,” the Doctor says, guiding her. His hands suggest; they do not dictate. “Try again?”

He will not hurt her the way the guards did, for pleasure or to prove their superiority or out of mindless habit. She knows that now. He is not that kind of man.

He hurts her when he is afraid that she will leave.

All right, then. She can see that uneven ring of punctures on his palm, red brown scabs angry against blanched white skin. Teeth marks.

She has hurt him when she is afraid too.

He will treat her well. At least as long as she seems content. 

As long as he does not think she will go away.

Is that enough? Can she make it more?

SJ can feel herself hovering on the edge of something; she has been hovering there all day. Another choice, another turning point. She doesn’t have to make it, she tells herself. Last night could be an anomaly; she could make herself forget it.

“Crook the thumb a bit more, here,” the Doctor says. He makes the shape with his hands for her to mirror. A smile stealing over his face like a dawning sun. “Yes, just like that.”

She tries on the shape of days ahead in her mind. Growing into this space, this cell, becoming part of it. With the Doctor. Sabotage, and lessons, and talking—slowly with pen and paper, or quickly with hands or knuckles against stone. 

Or the way last night, when he— She glances swiftly at him, but he is intent on her hands, on the sentences she is repeating. He does not seem to hear her thoughts.

She would still be doing the work she had done as part of the resistance, only sideways, slantwise, hidden—sabotage every fifth, fourth, third machine so that it blows up in a soldier’s face, so that material resources and time are wasted, so that the government is slowed, crippled, gradually broken.

They will be discovered, now and again—the Doctor will be disciplined, she will be left behind to patch him up when he returns. Last night, the impossibility of it (the tears, the helplessness, the safety) will recur over and over again until she can feel the rhythm of it in her blood, until it is just one more piece of the pattern of her existence.

One bed, one armchair, countless machines. Two walls of stone, two walls of metal bars. Two boxes of books, more if Section Leader Shaw feels like being flattered. 

Always wondering what he could do inside her mind if he felt like it. Always wondering if he is already doing it.

Can she live like this? One year, two years, ten, twenty-five, fifty? The seconds will fall like snow and bury her alive (again; she is already buried alive in earth and stone) and how long will what air she has last, how long will she be able to breathe?

“Exam time, then,” he says. “Go on, ask me a question.”

She looks at him sharply; he nods. “Any question.” He knows what he is giving her.

What does she want to know most of all?

She signs, **What are you? An experiment, or…** She stops. She doesn’t know the word for alien, falters at spelling it out. Her hands repeat: **Or…**

 _Can you hear me?_ she thinks before she can lose her courage. _Doctor, can you hear me?_

He smiles, a little sadly. “Or.”

He can’t hear her anymore.

She shouldn’t be disappointed, she should be relieved, why can’t she—and she doesn’t want to think about it, so she blurts another question, even though he hadn’t agreed to two:

 **Why do you do it? The** \-- and she remembers the camera and steps closer, spells out on the hidden surface of his palm: **sabotage. Why not just refuse to work at all?**

Something closes in his face, and for a second she thinks he is angry. She almost takes a step back.

Then the tension leaches from his face, and he only looks… He gives her an echo of a smile, bleak. “A clever girl like you, you haven’t figured it out?” His fingers trail along her jawline and then drop. He sighs.  
“The carrot and the stick, Miss Smith. The carrot and the stick.”

He turns away with an air of finality, and this time she cannot bring herself to ask him anything more.

xxxxx

SJ makes herself not open the book right away. She lies in bed, counting as slowly as she can to ten, twenty, thirty. She peels back the foil of the candy bar, takes a nibble. Barely tastes it.

Her hands are shaking as she takes out the book. She makes herself just hold it for a moment. Red binding. The dust jacket was torn off long ago and there is no title or author on the front, but the publisher’s name glitters in gold cursive on the back. She traces the indented loops and swirls with her fingers, heart pounding. It is small but solid in her hands, and she wonders how many years it has gone unread. As soon as she opens it, it will become one thing, one text put together by one person at just one point in time. But for now, for this moment before she cracks the cover, it holds the possibilities of all things and could be any of them at all.

 _Just one chapter_ , she promises herself. She has to savor it, make it last. _One chapter if it’s a novel, one story if it’s a collection, ten poems if it’s poetry. And if it’s a bloody textbook…_ Well, she’ll read it anyway. Beggars can’t be choosers.

She takes a deep breath, and opens the cover. Turns to the first page, the paper crackling.

_When age fell upon the world, and wonder went out of the minds of men; when grey cities reared to smoky skies tall towers grim and ugly, in whose shadows none might dream of the sun or of Spring’s flowering meads; when learning stripped Earth of her mantle of beauty, and poets sang no more save of twisted phantoms seen with bleared and inward-looking eyes; when these things had come to pass, and childish hopes had gone away for ever, there was a man who traveled out of life on a quest whither the world’s dreams had fled…_

xxxxx

She turns the page, and there are no more pages.

Done.

For the moment time holds utterly still, refusing to accept this fact: she cannot be done. She cannot have read the entire thing; she only read one extra page, and then another, and another… Journeys do not end so abruptly; you cannot arrive at destinations before you see them. She has been spent dozens of lives within these pages and yet no time has passed at all; she was prepared to spend dozens more. She turns the book over in her hands, flips its pages, as though she could have somehow skipped a story, fumbled and turned from page seventy-three to ninety-eight. Just one more…

Done.

And time, grudgingly, filters back into the world with the beat of her heart and the ticking of the clock outside her bed-curtain, and the world filters back into her senses: the rough fabric of the pillow pressed against her cheek, still smelling faintly of soap and the Doctor; the warmth trapped by the blanket around her legs and the chill air on her face and hands, the weight of all the earth above her and the weight of her regret at having been so greedy, at not being able to stop herself from devouring this fragile, precious thing all at once…

She can read this book again, of course. But she can never read it again for the first time. 

SJ bites her lip and tells herself not to be so melodramatic. There are other books. She will have more self-control with them. It is a wonder she has any books at all.

She never actually thanked the Doctor for that, did she?

It is the least she can do.

Still holding the book, she slips out of bed. But where…oh.

It takes only a second to locate the Doctor, all six feet plus of him curled in the green armchair, his neck crooked at an angle that promises stiffness and pain when he awakes. The cell is strangely still and empty without his active presence: tinkering, humming, striding to and fro.

It is only the second time she has ever seen him sleeping.

She would have _given_ him the bed if he’d asked, he didn’t have to—why did he keep—he could have ordered her to the chair, he’d done it before—

If she were a better person she could hate him now, still. For the things he has done and the things he has not done, for his coldness, his cowardice, his complicity. Andrea and Fitzoliver would have been able to hate him no matter what sops he threw them, a pure focused hatred like ice or searing flame. And Sully…not hate, no, but pity so cutting and deep that it would have been worse than contempt. If she were better, if she were stronger…

But look at him. The lines on his face, etched by exhaustion. His shoulders bent, his head tucked, trying to fit his long frame into a chair that isn’t even comfortable for _her_ to sleep in. His legs stretching out along the floor, the trousers looking whiter than before and more neatly creased—he waited all day to do the laundry again, waited until she was asleep so it wouldn’t look like he was criticizing her.

His mouth hangs slightly open, soft and vulnerable. And she cannot hate him.

He is all alone, and she is all alone, and she needs him so very, very much.

Her vision blurs.

“Sarah.” His voice groggy, just waking. He sits up in the chair. “Sarah, what’s wrong?”

 **Nothing** , she signs, clumsy with the book still in her hands, the tears sliding down her face hot and strange and helpless. She clutches the book tight to her chest.

He motions towards the tome. “Was it so very bad?” he asks softly.

SJ shakes her head vehemently. **It was—** she makes the sign for **good** but it’s not enough so she makes it again, larger, more sweeping, and then it’s still not enough so she spells out the word she doesn’t know yet: **w-o-n-d-e-r-f-u-l. Thank you.**. 

“I’m pleased,” he says. Still looking up at her, watching her for a sign or clue, he hooks a stool with his right foot and pulls it in front of him, its metal legs rattling and scraping over the cement. Holds out his hand.

And just like that, it hits her, why he didn’t hear her before.

_Touch telepathy._

In the bed with the dreams, and in the shower when he nearly drowned her in himself, and that time after the acid when he sent her away from herself and turned her into a sleepwalker, a living doll—he was always touching he when he got inside her head.

SJ takes a deep breath, crosses the room, takes his hand. Sits on the stool before he can tug gently down, because she knows even a suggestion of coercion now will make her flee.

And this time, she’s not going to.

His hand is easy in hers; her grip is too tight. She bites her lip so hard it hurts and makes herself look him in the eyes.

_Can you hear me? Doctor?_

His eyes widen, his fingers flex around hers (but she can’t pull away now, not now). _Miss Smith? Are you doing that on--_

\-- _purpose, yes._ And more tears spill out, she can’t help it, one fear gone and only a few more to go. _You can hear me. Oh God, you can hear me._

 _Humans shouldn’t be able—how long have you known you could do this?_ His voice bounces in silent echoes off the insides of her skull, impossibly solid and real. His eyes bore into hers, blue, blue, blue.

 _Last night._ And it’s too hard to explain in words, so she just pushes a snapshot towards him, one moment of terror and drowning and self-erosion as his voice thundered in her mind and his hands were tight around her arms, that constriction and pain the only way she knew she still existed in the roar and the deluge—

He flinches back from her. 

“You said—“ He clears his throat, glances quickly over her shoulder. The camera. They have to make this look natural. _You said I didn’t make you do anything._

 _You didn’t. You just…_ Another snapshot, this time not quite meaning to; it just pops out towards him. His apology, and his explanation: all the lights were connected, and they sparked blue…

His free hand comes up to fiddle with the shirt fabric over his chest, and she knows he is remembering (is it her best guess, or is she reading his mind?) her nails catching on his skin, scraping **I WON’T** into his flesh in desperation and futility.

She needs to distract him, or he is going to panic. She can feel it in the tenseness of his hands and the grip of his gaze and the taste of his thoughts, electric and bitter. 

Bad things happen when he panics.

SJ takes his hand, and brings it up to her cheek. She leans into his palm, lets his long fingers brush her temple. Her eyes are still watering, but she keeps her gaze locked with his.

_Miss Smith, what are you doing?_

_Trusting you._

His fingers twitch, just touching the curve of her ear. _And still crying, I notice._

SJ blinks fiercely. _You try holding still while you wait to see if someone’s going to make you into a wind-up toy again._

 _I see._ His mental voice is colder. _So when you said ‘trusting,’ you really meant—_

_Dammit, I’m trying!_

He flinches. “All right, all right.” He switches back to verbal when he’s startled; he’ll have to get better at avoiding that if they’re to keep this secret. He’s still wincing, just a little. It seems he’s not the only one who can make this hurt if they overreact. But he’s not hurting her back. _I apologize. I deserved that._

 _Yes,_ she agrees. But she pushes her face a little harder into his palm, tries to even out her breathing. He has not done anything yet. He might not do anything at all. SJ knows that.

She just has to keep telling herself that until she _believes._

She can feel his presence at the edges of her mind, a tentative peering. 

“This is all very sudden,” he says out loud, a careful soft sound like gravel shifting, and then, _I was startled, and I…do not act at my best when I am startled. As you know. As you saw when I…_ He hesitates; she can almost hear the sound of words being un-chosen. _Please tell me what it is you would have me do._

Just…nothing. His hand is warming against her face. It is not so different from a human hand. She doesn’t know if she feels good or bad about the fact that his hand is not so different from a human hand. _I need to know that I can do this, and make it easy for you, and you still won’t…just do nothing. Please._

He nods, and swallows, the sound oddly large in the silent room. She closes her eyes, lets her world become small sounds: her breathing, his breathing, their pulses—hers pounding in her ears, his faint and doubled at his wrist. The slight rustle of upholstery as he shifts, just barely, in his chair; the thin scratch of her stool’s leg as she settles her weight, leaning forward.

His thumb strokes her skin, a small, fragile motion, butterfly light and swift. A twitch more than a conscious touch. 

She would like to fit the whole world into that small space where the pad of his thumb meets her cheek, into that movement of less than a centimeter across her skin, into that moment where comfort is simple and she might be safe.

 _I don’t want to fight anymore,_ she says, opening her eyes.

 _Now if I believed that, I would truly be worried._ His fingers brush against her hair where it falls over her ear, this touch quick, furtive. He clears his throat. “Your hair’s growing out.” He winds a lock loosely around his index finger. “It’s starting to curl.”

 _I can’t be your pet_ , she says before she can lose her courage. _Your kept thing. I’m not some stray cat you can leave a saucer of cream out for until she lets down her guard and comes close enough for you to scratch her under the chin. I can’t do that, be that, and—and stay._ She swallows, and pushes on. _So I want a deal._

 _You’re taking yourself hostage._ The tension is back, in his voice and in his hand against her face—he had almost jerked it away at her first sentence, but it was trapped under hers. _Under other circumstances, I might be impressed._

 _I hate that you own me_ , she says. The words rush out. _I hate that they gave me to you, that they made me into a thing to be given. I hate that I can’t think about you or anything you do without taking into consideration that I’m supposed to be your bribe, or your blackmail, or your—_

 _\--carrot and stick,_ he finishes. 

She nods, and he must think for a moment that the motion means she’s trying to break away now, because his grip tightens and his other hand comes up to rest on the book in her lap, not quite touching her other hand.

 _You know that I could make you forget to hate it,_ he says. His eyes are measuring. _I could make you want to stay._

And she knew that this move was coming but still her pulse skyrockets and her lungs squeeze tight and her foot kicks, once, against the concrete floor, as if it is trying to propel her away—she has to run, to hide, to disappear—

And she makes herself stop, and stay in place, and stare him down.

 _I know. And I know you don’t want to do that if you don’t have to._ She touches his hand on top of her book. _I’m not asking for so very much. Will it harm anything to listen to my proposal?_

One second. Two. Three. Four. Five.

This was a mistake. It was all a mistake.

Six. Seven. Eight.

Should have kept her mouth shut, should have kept her cards close to her chest, shouldn’t have trusted him for one second, any second now it was going to be all over. Nine. T—

He nods.

She remembers to breathe again.

_What exactly are your conditions, then, Miss Smith?_

She taps the top of his hand once. _The sabotage. We step it up, as_ partners _. You let me in on your plans, for the individual projects and for the sabotage as a whole. You give me details, and you listen to my input, and you consider my suggestions._

_Done. And…?_

Two taps. She bites her lip, hard; steels her jaw. _And you don’t ever go inside my head—you don’t ever do anything to my mind, calm me down, put me to sleep, give me good feelings, I don’t care what—without my permission._

He glances at her sharply, then takes his right hand away from her face, slides his left hand from between hers and the book; holds them up as if to show that he is unarmed. He leans forward, slowly, not breaking eye contact until she can feel his breath puff warm against her ear—

(until her head is blocking his lips from the camera’s view—)

\--and whispers, “Is speaking permissible?”

He leans back into his chair almost immediately, lets the space flow back between them, a buffer. 

She rallies and reaches for his hand again. _Of course talking’s fine. Just…_ She hesitates; she wasn’t planning on tacking on an addendum. Acceptable risk? _Just don’t startle me? Let me initiate it._

 _Of course._ His thumb traces a circle. _This is…not unpleasant. You have my word, I will not endanger it._

_The talking or the handholding?_

“Both. Either.” He shrugs, avoiding her gaze for the first time tonight. _And the rest of your conditions?_

_That’s it._

He’s startled into looking back at her. _Nothing else? At all? Surely—_

 _Those are the things that matter._ And now she’s the one who can’t look at him. _If you keep your promises, I can resign myself to anything else you might—that might happen. And if you don’t…well, then it won’t really make any difference, will it?_

A deep breath, his whole frame shifting with it. Another feather-light circle across her skin. “You know, Miss Smith—it is true that they gave you to me, and that I hold many advantages over you. I am larger, and stronger, and more integral to our captors’ schemes. But there is one arena in which you have the edge: you are far, far braver.”

His voice is a low rumble, soft and soothing, but it’s the kind of soothing that reminds her of lullabies and deep blue eyes and losing herself, and that combined with the unwarranted flattery is only making her tense up even more.

_What do you want?_

He’s startled; his hand stutters against her skin. He blinks rapidly, two, three times. “Who said I wanted anything?”

 _Don’t answer out loud!_ she snaps. _And of course you bloody want something, you’re buttering me up, aren’t you?_

 _And you said you didn’t want to fight._ He almost smiles. _It’s sad to see cynicism in one so young. Not a thing gets past you, does it, Miss Smith? Watching and watching with those lovely bright eyes._

She grips his hand over the book so tight she can feel his bones. _Are you going to tell me or not?_

“It’s—” He catches himself. _It’s not important. It’ll keep a night._

 _Partner or pet?_ she insists. _Tell me._

 _Very well,_ he says. _But you’re not going to like it._ He sighs, interlaces his fingers with hers, takes her other hand from her cheek to lay it on top of their joined hands. _I need to ask…permission._

A second to understand what he is saying, and then ice in her mind and blaring white. _NO._

_Please, Sarah, listen. Last night—anything I did in your mind would be like a surgeon operating drunk. There’s no knowing the damage I might have caused, the things I might have left behind—_

She shakes her head. _No!_

 _You might feel fine just now, you might_ be _fine just now, but if I left something behind that your brain eventually can’t work around, that’s too alien or incompatible—Sarah—_ The tenor of his mental voice is rising, desperate. _You could go mad. You could die._

 _And I’m choosing to take that chance._ She jabs him in the chest with her index finger. _I. Me. Because it’s my head, and I don’t want you rooting around in there. Got it?_

She watches him struggle for several long moments. It all happens behind his eyes, his face still as stone. His hands still gripping hers tightly, so that she cannot move. Her breath stays caught in her throat.

At last he huffs, angrily, and nods his head. _Got it._

She’s alert for the slightest hint of encroachment on the borders of her mind, the most tentative exploratory touch. But she doesn’t feel anything. The exact opposite, in fact—it’s as if he’s raised walls all around his mind, smooth marble with no doors. And she doesn’t feel any differently than she did a few moments ago—she definitely doesn’t want him in there. _That’s it?_

_As you expressed so eloquently, Miss Smith, it is your own mind. I’m sure you know it better than I do._

He looks far from happy about it, though, his shoulders strung tight and his mouth a thin hard line. His hand gone stiff and uncommunicative in hers, his foot tapping an insistent drumbeat against the floor as if he can’t wait to withdraw.

There are walls in his eyes, too, but they are not as well built as the ones around his mind, and she can see anger and worry and anguish spilling around the edges.

Oh, decisions. They never do get easier.

He moves as if to stand.

SJ grabs at his hand, tugs him back down. Glares, at him and at the small shrieking voices still inside her, telling her to stop. _All right, go ahead._

The Doctor gapes. “What?”

She shrugs, carefully nonchalant. Can he hear her heart hammering? _I just needed to know you’d back off if I said so._

There is a spring wound tight in her chest, and she holds it still, holds it firm and careful, holds it and keeps it from winding tighter like it wants to, because if it winds any tighter then it and she will snap.

 _I see._ He’s too stunned for a moment to say anything else. “We should—“ _We should remove ourselves to a more private location. The only surveillance device_ should _be that hall camera, and that without sound, but this would be no time to discover that Beth has been experimenting with overcoming my short-range jamming signals._

He leads her to the bed, the side facing away from the camera, and parts the curtain. She sits on the edge of the bed and makes herself stay in her body as she sits on the bed (because nothing bad is going to happen, it _isn’t_ , stop it, it isn’t) and watches as he kneels beside her to fumble with a piece of burnt out junk underneath. A hidden compartment pops open, and he brings out two small disks, gives each of their sides a cursory check, and slides them back in. He takes a seat next to her on the bed, and takes her hand.

 _Everything’s in place._ He gives her hand a light squeeze. “You’re certain, now? Because once we start, if you change your mind, it may take several moments to safely disengage.”

She closes her eyes, braces herself. _You take it slow,_ she demands. _And you tell me what you’re doing every step of the way._

“Your wish is my command.” He cups her face with both hands, his fingers on her temples.

_What are you—_

“Nothing, yet.” He leans his forehead against hers. “Will you open your eyes, please?”

_No._

“I’m not going to hypnotize you, Miss Smith. It will just make this easier if I can maintain eye contact.”

_I said no._

“I suppose this is another test?” His voice is carefully stripped of emotion or judgment. Just noting, theorizing. “Very well, we’ll do it the difficult way then. I’m going to touch you now.”

It’s so light she might be imagining it, fingertips trailing over water in her thoughts.

“I’m just barely skimming the surface of your mind right now.” He is speaking out loud but so soft she might think it was in her mind if she didn’t feel his breath against her cheek with each word. “Feeling for any rents or tears. If I punched my way through last night—” he hesitates—“but I’m not sensing any damage at this stage. What an extraordinarily plastic mind you must have.” His voice goes musing. “I wonder if it’s a result of the sustained interrogation, or a natural anomaly…”

_You mean you can’t just stroll into everybody’s brain like that?_

“I’m hardly strolling,” he says, almost offended. It would be funny if she weren’t so scared. “This takes a great deal of concentration, you know. Especially without eye contact or previous conditioning with a rhyme or similar mnemonic device. I’m not, ah…” He huffs, this time a small, rather embarrassed sound. “I’m not actually particularly good at it.”

It’s either kind or devious of him to downplay his abilities, and SJ is concentrating too hard on not panicking to decide.

_Well, you could have fooled me._

A pause, then, “You have a strong will, Miss Smith. If I’d kept you under hypnosis much longer than a week, I’m sure you would have broken out on your own.”

No no no, why did he have to bring that up now, doesn’t he know how hard this already is without reminding her, doesn’t he know how terrified she already is that she’s just signed on the line for her own lobotomy, can’t he feel her heartbeat stopping—

 _I don’t want to talk about that right now,_ she says. Keeps tight hold of the words, lets them out one by one. _Just get it over with._

“This will be just a moment,” he says. “I’ll be going a little deeper now. Listening to the hum of your brain hard at work. All those frantic little neurons and synapses, with their electrical and chemical signals dashing to and fro like workers on a factory floor.”

He’s there, he’s _in_ her, she can feel him, poking and prodding behind her eyes—her fingernails bite into the mattress and she tries to hold still, still as she can, and not run.

“Seems normal enough. A little deeper, now… An overactive amygdala, but that’s not really surprising, given present circumstances… I’m going to touch a few places as I check, don’t be alarmed if some random images flit through your mind—”

_(A sound like pages rustling, smell of fresh cut grass, tobacco smoke—_

_Cold blue eyes_

_The scalpel coming down_

_Sully’s smile—)_

A tear, a straggler behind all the others she has shed this night, slides down her cheek. She can feel herself trembling in his hands.

“Sarah? Are you all right?”

_Fine. Did you see what I…_

“No. I didn’t want to pry. I know this is…we’re almost done.” His voice is gruff, contained. “It doesn’t look as though I left anything behind. There’s a bit of—well, I suppose ‘bruising’ is the nearest analogy, I could ease that if you—”

_Is it going to kill me or drive me mad if you don’t?_

“Well…no. But it’ll give you a nasty headache later this week.”

_Leave it alone._

“It’ll only take—”

_Leave. It. ALONE._

And maybe he finally feels her shaking, or maybe a note of hysteria manages to worm its way out of her control and into her voice, because the Doctor doesn’t argue any further. He just breathes in deep, and slow as melting frost, pulls back from her. Lets go.

“All done.”

SJ opens her eyes, manages to release her death-grip on the mattress. The world filters back in, normal sights and sounds. He’s gone from her mind. Alone in her head, nothing there, blessedly, blessedly alone. 

Alone.

A word big enough to drown out the universe and not even notice her.

Her hands are a little shaky as she signs, **Thank you.** She means for not doing what he could have done.

“You’re welcome.” He stands, fidgets for a moment before turning away, and then turning back. “If I may confess…I still don’t understand why you let me. When I know there’s nothing that frightens you more than what I did—why you trusted me.”

Because if she does not trust anybody, she will go mad. Because she is afraid that when he was gone, she already started. Because she knows she will wither and die without trust, and even after everything, she is so afraid of dying, of disappearing and ceasing to be. Because she cannot hate him as much as she knows she should. Because he gave her a book and for a few hours, she was not a prisoner.

Because she saw him naked and he had scars all over too.

Because he did not hit her when the soap got into the cuts.

She touches the tips of her fingers to his wrist. _Because I want to trust you._

His eyes are bright.

“Humans,” he says with a laugh. It is only a little choked. “So given to rash action.”

xxxxxx

Only a few hours before she’s supposed to get up, and already she’s considering another rash action.

SJ can’t hear him puttering around and that means he’s gone back to sleep in the armchair. Or tried to go back to sleep.

He’s not going to recover like that. Even with busywork days, even if they can keep the busywork days going without incurring further punishment.

She’s not considering what she’s considering because she’s lonely.

Lonely’s not the word for what she is.

Alone.

But she doesn’t have to be.

SJ gets up under the pretense of getting another book out of the boxes, and sure enough, there he sits, curled awkwardly against the chair cushions, eyes open but unfocused, one step away from sleep but awake all the same. His eyes snap up at her as she moves towards him.

She taps his shoulder, right where his skin meets the seam of his shirt. _You’re not well yet. You should have the bed again._ She indicates the bed with her other hand and makes a beckoning gesture so the camera will have nothing suspicious to note in their interaction, no odd gaps in their communication.

The Doctor is already shaking his head before her sentence is finished. “You stayed up all night tonight reading, and all night yesterday nursing me back to health. If you don’t get any sleep soon you’re going to faint face-first onto a Bunsen burner.”

He’s got a point. _All right. So we’ll share._

The Doctor’s eyes widen and he opens his mouth, to protest or agree, SJ doesn’t know, because she cuts him off first.

 _Just for tonight, and _just_ for sleeping_.

“Well, of course—I mean, it’s a very generous offer, but—”

She squeezes his shoulder to cut off the flow of words, to remind him that they’re being watched.

_I let you grub around in my brain, didn’t I? And it turned out all right. I’m not fussed about sleeping arrangements._

Her bravado’s only a little more than half false.

He reaches up to take her hand. Ghosts the pads of his fingertips over her knuckles, watches her face as he does so. 

He watches her face as though it’s a puzzle with all the edge pieces missing and he doesn’t know what the final picture is supposed to be.

“Didn’t anyone ever tell you,” he asks softly, “that you don’t have to climb a mountain all in one go?”

_It’s not a mountain. It’s an abyss. You can’t inch across an abyss. You have to leap, all at once._

_Is this another test?_

She compresses her lips. _Maybe._

And if he recovers a little quicker because of it, that’s fine too. 

And if she has an anchor to hold her in place, to remind her where reality is, to give her moments that are not terrible…

_Is it a test of how long I’ll keep saying no? Or a test of my conduct if I say yes?_

_You’re going to say yes. Because it’s my bed, isn’t it? You said so. I’m your partner, not your pet, right? So I can have things. And I can offer them to other people. Because they’re mine._

_Specious argument,_ he says, but his shoulders have relaxed. His eyes are dancing now, a little. _I propose a trade._

She’s half wary, half intrigued. _What sort of trade?_

_Whatever sort you like. Since you are so determined to have me disturb your slumber for a second night, allow me to offer some recompense._

_You’re giving me a blank cheque?_ She can’t quite believe this sudden generosity. People don’t work like this. Life doesn’t work like this. You ask for as little as possible so you’re not disappointed when what you want is too much; gifts always come with strings attached.

_Perhaps one of the items that didn’t make the final cut for the contract you proposed._

The enormity of the offer blinds her for a moment, overwhelms her with possibilities. But only for a moment.

She is a newsrunner, first and always, and there is only one thing a newsrunner can never have too much of: information.

If they’re going to be allies, there are some blanks she’ll need filled in.

 _I want you to tell me a story,_ she says. _About you. You know so much about me, and I still don’t even know your real name. I don’t know really anything about you at all._

“Once I was a lord in a far away kingdom,” the Doctor orates grandly, “but I fell under a terrible curse and was forced to travel as a wandering bard…” _Really, Miss Smith, I must maintain some mystery. How am I to entertain you after you’ve sniffed out all my secrets?_

_If you tell it right, I’ll have more questions when you’re done than when you started._

“I do believe I detect a challenge,” the Doctor says. He is sitting up all the way now. _Very well. I accept my role as your Scheherazade._ ”

He smiles, and SJ almost smiles back before she bites it down. They’re only allies. Not friends. Allies, out of necessity.

The first move is hers. 

(The first move is always hers. He waits for her, makes her make the move.)

SJ takes his hand and leads him to the bed.

She slides back under the covers, her warmth almost faded from the sheets. Scoots to the far side of the bed and huddles under the blanket, watching the Doctor over the fabric’s edge. She feels like a tortoise, peering out of its shell at a hovering eagle.

He sits on the edge of the bed, and swings his long legs up. Shuts the curtain. The bed is not large enough to allow for distance, so he lies down barely a hand-span from her, on top of the blanket rather than under it.

“I’d only leach away your body heat,” he says by way of explanation. “At least this way I may provide some insulation.”

She’s not about to thank him for something she may regret later, so she flips around so that her back’s to him, curls into herself. Watches the play of light and shadow on her side of the curtain. He may not be radiating much warmth, but she can feel his presence behind her like a wall or a mountain. Casting his shadow over the warp and weft of this small pocket of space, looming up to their concrete sky.

“So, your story. Well. Let’s see. In the center of the Universe there is a well from which the gods draw the waters of Time—”

SJ twists her head around to look at him; pokes his arm. _I wanted a true story._

“It’s perfectly true, Miss Smith,” he says. “You just have to listen in the right way.”

SJ rolls her eyes and turns back. Well, she did challenge him to ‘tell it right.’

“Now, where was I?” The Doctor clears his throat. “In the center of the Universe, there is a well from which the gods draw the waters of Time. In the cold and murky waters writhe vermin, crawling centipedes and scuttling spiders and secret sliming things. And above, secreted in the chinks of crumbling stone, there live lizards who watch the bucket being pulled, and drink from its spilled waters. They are beautiful and cold and proud, and call themselves dragons.

“Once upon a time, there was a dragon who was not very good at being a dragon. He could not kill the vermin that slithered their way up to the dragon’s stone wall citadel, his treasures were nothing to look upon, and all but one of the eggs he fathered had shells too fragile to hatch. All but one, and that one, when hatched, proved even weaker than he.

“Had he been a proper dragon, he would have killed it, and preserved what family honor he had not already destroyed. But he was not a proper dragon, and it was his only hatchling, and he could not.

“So he stole a boat of autumn leaves and scraps of paper, and he and the hatchling left behind the kingdom of dragons and plunged down into the terrible darkness…”

xxxxx

The clang of metal on stone snaps her eyes open, and the first thing she sees is the Doctor levering himself out of bed, his brow creased. “They don’t usually deliver rations this early…”

And then he’s through the curtain and gone. 

SJ takes a moment to shift under the covers, checking herself for any soreness. There’s none. Not that she expected there to be any, or she wouldn’t have done what she did. But. 

Don’t take anything for granted. Not yet.

She’s not sure what to look for in her mind, but at least she’s still thinking to check. At some point she will have gone far enough down this path she’s chosen that she can’t turn back, and then she will have to stop second-guessing herself or the whole exercise will have been pointless. But she’s not quite there yet.

She follows the Doctor.

“Brace yourself,” he says as she emerges. “It seems Section Leader Shaw wants something.”

He’s uncovered the rations tray, and…

Three oranges. Two limes. A grapefruit. Tea and bread, which is usual, but a pitcher of milk for the tea, condensation beading on the glass, and honey, and a pat of butter just beginning to melt. 

That’s it. She’s gone mad.

 **What** she starts to sign.

“Decoding the Section Leader’s munificence is really quite simple,” the Doctor says. He begins to divide the food into two separate piles. “Books are ‘thank you’ and citrus is ‘please.’ It saves her the trouble of having to learn the actual words, you see.”

 **What if it’s--** dammit, still so many words she doesn’t have signs for, she taps this one out in Morse: **trick**?

“Always a possibility,” the Doctor agrees. “That’s why a core sample of each of these is going through analysis over there.” He nods to the counter. “Assuming none of this is drugged or poisoned, would you like to trade?”

SJ focuses back on the impossible bounty; he’s offering one of his oranges for half her bread. It’s more than fair. She nods.

He makes the switch just as the timer on the counter goes off. He strides over, peers at the samples.

“Perfectly safe,” he rules at last. “Thank goodness. Much longer without Vitamin C, and you’d be coming down with scurvy. And calcium can never go amiss in a growing human body.”

She hesitates, and for once he reads it right.

“Beth will make her demands whether or not you eat it,” he says softly. “It will not bind you to follow them more than we are already bound.”

They sit down to their meal—she’ll have to eat it all, this time; the fruit is already wizened and the dairy will not keep the day, even with the cell as cold as it is. The milk and the butter with her bread are too rich for her mouth after months of starvation rations; she almost spits it out before her taste buds remember the joy of it. The citrus bursts when she bites in and stickies her lips, sour juice and sweet dribbling down her chin in turn, until she catches the drops with her fingers. She scrapes the peels down to the pith, and then—daring the Doctor with her eyes to comment—consumes the bitter peel as well. She cannot forget how little they usually have; she cannot waste a thing.

And the peel is not so bad, really, though it sticks in her throat a bit, as she wonders how much time they will have to consider this a blessing, how long before Section Leader Shaw sweeps in, and presents them with the bill.

xxxxx

They don’t have long to wait. They’re just setting up the first experiment of the day when the door at the end of the hall opens, and Beth Shaw makes her entrance, and tells the Doctor what she wants.

She wants SJ.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As ever, Doctor Who is not my property, and neither is the play SJ tries to read in this chapter, "A Doll's House" by Henrik Ibsen. No comment on whether I am choosing her reading material by just picking books off my shelves and checking the copyright date.

“Oh, honestly,” the Section Leader says. “You’d think I’d asked to borrow the centrifuge, or one of the _important_ pieces of equipment.”

“Miss Smith is not available for lending,” the Doctor returns coldly.

SJ can only see the Doctor’s back; he had moved in front of SJ the second that Section Leader Shaw had made her demands. SJ wants to move, she wants to stand by the Doctor’s side, wants to look the Section Leader in the eye.

Her legs won’t let her move.

“We have an agreement,” the Doctor is saying. “You passed ownership on to me, and your own interests ceased. Though I can’t see what possible torment you could have forgotten the first time around.”

The Section Leader taps her foot. “This paranoia really doesn’t suit you, Doctor. I simply wish to offer your assistant a cup of tea and inquire as to how she is settling in.”

“Oh well, tea,” the Doctor says sarcastically. “That’s perfectly fine, then. You may be a sadistic monster, but certainly no one can accuse you of being a foreign agent.”

“Careful, Doctor.” Her words are a whiplash, and SJ’s feet back up a step. “Don’t forget your place.”

“Don’t forget yours either,” he returns. “Does the Brigade Leader know you’re down here playing this little game?”

A pause, then: “The Brigade Leader is a busy man. I could make this cell very comfortable for you, Doctor. Or very uncomfortable. All without him ever knowing.”

“Well, we’ll see about that, won’t we?”

“We will indeed.” Shaw snaps her fingers, and the soldiers rise to open the door for her. She pauses in the entranceway. “In the meantime, consider: is she really offering value for money?”

xxxxx

The parting shot echoes in SJ’s head as the Doctor strides around the lab, muttering deprecations upon the Section Leader and slamming equipment onto the lab tables too hard. SJ tries not to jump every time he slams a piece of equipment down too hard. He’s angry at the Section Leader, not her. She knows that. She knows.

A beaker shatters, and SJ’s hands grip the countertop tight. 

“Oh blast,” the Doctor snaps. “Miss Smith, have you seen the broom?”

She manages to make a gesture. She’s not sure exactly where she’s gesturing to, but maybe it’s enough, maybe he won’t notice—

“Where?”

Damn.

There is a piece of paper in front of her. She has to keep staring at the piece of paper. There are marks on the piece of paper, but she can’t read them, and she has to keeping holding tight to the counter and staring at the piece of paper and trying to read them—

“Miss Smith?”

—or he’ll realize something is wrong, and there isn’t anything wrong, she’ll be fine in just a minute if she just—

_value for money_

“Miss Smith?”

And his voice is so close she flinches, overbalancing, and the stool topples—clang!—and he catches her—

His arms go around her. “You’re shaking,” he says. His hand finds her cheek, tries to turn her face towards him, but her head pulls away from his grasp without her permission, pulls her head down so her chin is tucked into her chest and her shoulders are hunched tight.

“Sarah?” he says softly.

She thinks he says it softly. All she can hear is the Section Leader’s voice in her head, from just now and from before, from The Room, the scrape of the metal and slick sound of cutting flesh, any second now the Section Leader might be back, might take her back—

“Is it what I said to Beth? About ownership? That was purely for her benefit, I assure you.”

The Doctor eases her to the ground and lets go; she scuttles backwards into the rows of cupboards, metal handles digging into her back. A wall to her back and she’s at least a little safe—of course she’s safe, of course she’s not going back—

 **Fine** , she makes herself sign. **Fine go away fine please fine.**

“That’s hardly up to your usual standard of prevarication.” He leans backward, spreads his hands wide, appeasing. Showing he is unarmed. As if he would need weapons. “Would you like to talk about it?”

**no**

A small motion, but the Doctor sees.

“All right,” the Doctor says. He stands, walks over the counter where the box of books sits. Selects a volume. Strides back, sits down, a little farther away from her than he was before, turned slightly away. He opens the book, flips a few pages with studied casualness. Adds, without looking up from the page, “They can’t do anything to you now, you know.”

He is not pursuing her, but he is still blocking her escape. _No, no, that’s wrong, stop it, don’t think like that._

“I know they hurt you very badly,” he continues, still addressing the book. His voice is soft. His hands shake a little on ‘hurt.’ “But that is over now. That was—that has always been my condition. They cannot touch you. If they take you away—I stop helping them.”

 **Get you another one.** Her hands leap from her lap, rap out their message on the floor of their own accord.

“No,” he says. He looks up from the book; tilts his head, trying to meet her eye. “I _stop.”_

 **Till they get you another one.** She’s telling him too much, letting him see all her fears, but her fingers twitch and itch and tap and she can’t still them.

“No,” he says again. “If I lost you as I lost Josie—then I might simply shut down again, become dormant for a time. But if they take you from me…if they are willing to violate my one condition, if there is not one single person I can keep safe from them—then there is simply no point in my going on. With anything. _Anything._ ” His fingers twist and curl at a corner of a page. “Do you understand, Sarah?”

She feels herself nod. 

“They cannot do a thing to you.”

 **Without your permission** , her treacherous fingers say. **If I’m not good, if you get tired of me** —

It hangs in the air, and she can’t take it back.

“Ah, is that it?”

He reaches out to her halfway, slowly, his hand outstretched in the space between them.

“I would not trade your company for worlds.”

The words are light, but the tone he says them in is anything but.

**Why?**

“Aside from not wishing so much as a cockroach to be given to their tender mercies?” he asks dryly.

She nods.

“I could never get tired of you,” he says. “Your questions, your actions, your choices—you are new to me every day.”

He raises his arm slightly, and she sees that he is offering it at an odd angle, palm first. The imprint of her teeth still stark against his skin.

“They may call you mine,” he says quietly. “And perhaps, in a certain sense, they are right. But I am yours as well. You may hate me, you may fear me, but you are still the closest thing I have to—to a ray of light in this dark place.

“Believe me, I will never let them take you.”

She lets out a long breath. She hadn’t even realized she was holding it.

 **You were lonely before I got here**. SJ is still uncertain, but the words are hers now, she is choosing them slow and steady and careful. She is remembering how to watch, and to listen, and to breathe. **You could get over being lonely again.**

“No,” he says. “Not after—not again.”

**I’m not Josie or Beth.**

She feels her breath catch in her throat again, just for a second.

“I don’t wish you to be them,” he says. “I simply wish you to be _here.”_

He is still offering her his hand, palm first.

Her hand steals out, fingers not quite touching the pale scars beginning to form on his palm, a semicircle of dots and dashes.

“Yours,” he says, as if that explains everything.

SJ extends one finger, brushes his skin. _Promise?_ she sends.

He nods.

“Partners,” he says. “Remember?”

She nods.

They both breathe out at the same time, and he smiles at her, and she nods again, feeling the weight go out of her shoulders, feeling a lightness expanding in her chest.

He is not perfect, but he is hers, and she knows him. 

_I don’t hate you_ , she says. _I wanted to, but I don’t._

His lips turn up just a little; his eyes remain grave. “You will, sometimes. Close quarters like this—it can’t be helped.” _I’ll try not to mind._

She scoots closer to him, ducks her head to press against his shoulder—she can’t quite do it naturally, she’s forgotten the gesture, and it’s something of a headbutt, defiant. The tips of his fingers twitch on her wrist, and she slides her hand into his. Their fingers interlace.

 _Sorry,_ she says.

_What for?_

_For saying all those things. Thinking them. Panicking, when I’d just promised that I’d try to trust you—_

He cuts her off with a gentle squeeze of her hand. “If you really still believed I was capable of such actions, you never would have let me in last night.” His voice is gruff; his thumb strokes over her knuckles. “You’ve taken a great many risks lately. I don’t know if you truly realized how many until this morning.”

_It was just, the Section Leader started talking and—_

_It’s all right._

The fabric of his shirt is rough against her face. She can feel her heart slowing, can hear his own heart beating its strange rhythm. _I hate depending on people._

_I gathered as much._

They sit in silence for a bit. He is not warm, but he is solid, and he is there. 

_I’m sorry as well,_ he says after awhile. _This might have all been much easier for you if I hadn’t—I used my suspicions as an excuse. It was convenient to have a reason why I shouldn’t get to know you, to keep from feeling—to let myself keep sulking, like a spoiled child._

There is a picture lurking behind his words. He’s trying to keep from sending it through, but SJ can glimpse the outline in faded sad pastels.

 _You miss her,_ she says. _I’ve always known that. You don’t have to hide it._

She presses her forehead harder against his shoulder, and he lets her.

It is not terrible.

Maybe it will last a little longer.

xxxxx

The rest of the day goes smoothly after that, experiments and notes and telepathic tete-a-tetes over when to resume the sabotage; the Doctor insists he’s ready to start immediately, while SJ thinks she still spies a little stiffness in his walk, wants to delay just one more day.

And then Beth Shaw appears again like a bad dream, her heels clicking down the cold stone floor towards their cell.

The Doctor moves to shield SJ once more, but she’s determined not to let him this time. She can carry her own weight. She stands at his side with her back straight and stares, lips set, at a spot over the Section Leader’s shoulder so it will look like she’s staring her in the eyes.

“It’s really no use your coming down here.” The Doctor’s voice is tight. “Unless you’ve developed an uncharacteristic fondness for failure. At some point, Beth, you really must learn to abandon a faulty hypothesis.”

“So you continue to refuse to let me borrow her?”

But Shaw isn’t even looking at him. Her focus is on SJ, and she’s smiling, a secret pleased smile like a cat who knows exactly what hole the mouse is about to come out of.

“I do indeed.” 

Shaw’s smile broadens, lips parting slowly to reveal a line of teeth. Tiger with her prey. She’s still looking right at SJ. “And what about Miss Smith’s opinion?”

The Doctor snorts. “And since when do you give a fig about Miss Smith’s opinion?”

“Oh, I don’t, Doctor. But you do. Or did you think I hadn’t been watching?” She gestures towards the camera. “It’s not the most entertaining viewing, I admit, but it’s at least a step above that insipid melodrama you played out with Miss Grant.”

Her lips twitch up a bit more with those last few words, her eyes still on SJ, and SJ feels her heart start to beat faster. She can almost hear the unspoken coda, directed right at her: _And you still don’t know exactly what happened to Miss Grant, do you?_

“Very well,” the Doctor says through gritted teeth, “Miss Smith, enlighten us as to whether you can resist the temptation of half an hour in the Section Leader’s company.”

He doesn’t turn to her as he says it, and SJ is briefly grateful as she brings up her hands to sign, it’s bad enough that the Section Leader keeps staring at her, she doesn’t know what she’d do with two sets of eyes on her, if she’d freeze or—

“I wouldn’t be so quick if I were you,” the Section Leader interrupts. She snaps her fingers, and a soldier steps forward. He is carrying a file.

It’s exactly the same way she used to summon an underling to bring her SJ’s file in The Room. 

SJ’s hands freeze midair.

The Section Leader flips through the pages. “Yes…yes, yes…oh good, his information was a bit difficult to track down, I was beginning to think we’d never find it…” Her nails pause on one particular page, her lips curling up as she relishes this particular bit of theatre. “Oh yes, it’s all here. Of course, you can’t be tempted. You couldn’t possibly be interested. Not in the definite and final fates of Dorothea Chaplet, Audrey McShane, Jeremy Fitzoliver, Andrea Yates, and Harry Sullivan.”

“It’s a trick,” the Doctor says, and the words are out of his mouth faster than SJ can respond to the names, faster than light.

_The names, she said their names..._

“I could give you all this information,” the Section Leader muses. “Still, it is the kind of…delicate…account best related in private.”

The Doctor is at the door in three strides. _“Go away.”_

It is a snarl.

The Section Leader’s gaze flickers to him for a moment, but she remains unperturbed. Her eyes are cold. Amused, if anything at all. She looks back at SJ. “Consider what I’ve said, Miss Smith. And consider who truly has your best interests at heart… the person who is willing to give you some freedom of movement, or the man who would keep you locked up all to himself?”

She turns to the Doctor, who is now sputtering in incoherent rage. “You know how to reach me when you’ve changed your mind.”

And with a turn of her heel and the click of the door at the end of the hall, she is gone.

SJ is still hearing the names in her head, is still seeing them paint themselves in black letters on the blaring blank white of her mind: _Dorothea Chaplet, Audrey McShane, Jeremy Fitzoliver, Andrea Yates, Harry Sullivan._

There is nothing in the world but those names.

“It’s a trick,” the Doctor says. He says it too loudly. “Beth playing her little games. She’s trying to drive a wedge between us. Divide and conquer. That’s all.”

_Dorothea Chaplet, Audrey McShane, Jeremy F—_

“Even if she does have any new information, which I highly doubt, she _knows_ your presence here is non-negotiable.”

_Andrea Yates, Harry Sulliv—_

“She’s simply trying to sow dissent—Sarah, are you listening to me?”

SJ pulls herself up as though out of a well. **Yes.**

“And you—you understand? You believe me, don’t you?”

He is looking right at her. His eyes are very bright and very blue. Sully had blue eyes.

**Yes.**

“Ah, well.” He doesn’t seem to know what to do, suddenly. He scrubs at a spot on the counter with the edge of his sleeve, darts a glance up at her, looks away. “Well. Let’s get on, then.”

So they do. They go back to testing the acid-resistance of various body armor fabric swatches, and SJ takes his notes, and hands him his test tubes, and tries not to hear those names in her head.

_Dottie. Audrey. Fitzoliver. Andy. Sully._

And it is only after the tenth test, when what she is writing begins to blur in front of her, that SJ realizes that she has started to cry.

“Miss Smith—oh, Sarah, please don’t. Please.” His voice is anguished, helpless. His voice is very close. His hand comes up towards the path of a tear down her cheek, falls down again before he can touch her. “You know better than anyone that Beth is utterly untrustworthy, you know I can’t let you go—” 

SJ reaches out blindly for him; her hand finds his arm, the skin below the shirt cuff. _Do you hear me trying to persuade you?_

He starts to gesture with the arm she is holding before stilling. “But…you were—”

 _I’ve wanted things before, and not got them._ The words pull her strength back into her. She feels it, bricks building up a wall. She wipes her tears away with her spare hand. _I’ll be fine._

“I’m—” He stops, lets out a breath. Opens his mouth again, shakes his head. He doesn’t seem to know what to say. “It’s not that I’m ungrateful, but—” His brow creases. “Why aren’t you fighting this?”

She lets her head fall forward against his chest. Less of a headbutt this time; she’s making progress. Lets her breath fall out of her, long and slow. _I promised, didn’t I? I promised I’d stay here with you_.

The Doctor starts; she feels it, his whole body jerking back from her just for a second. 

“You did,” he says. His other hand has come up to her hair; he strokes a strand over her ear. “That was the agreement. You stay with me. But—”

 _I keep my word_. She says it fiercely. The words burn her, leave her shaking.

She hears his breath catch in his chest. “I see.”

A deep breath, and then he pulls back from her, keeping one arm around her shoulder as he draws her back towards their work; he chatters on about the experiment, reiterating the data they’ve already gathered, giving her a few moments to finish collecting herself.

xxxxx

He stays close to her for the rest of the evening, doesn’t let her out of his sight even to the other side of the bed. He keeps darting glances at her, as if trying to catch her at something. Keeps touching her, light touches on her hand or shoulder, ostensibly to catch her attention, but almost as if to check that she is still there.

SJ makes herself not flinch from him, even when the touch is sudden, unexpected. She wants to let him know that she will not abandon him. His eyes are so wide, so frightened. He has given up so much for her, will give up so much more in comfort and in health and in safety. And for what? A slip of a girl, scarred and suspicious, who has always shied from him. If it calms him to be near her, it is a little thing. She can give it to him.

_Andrea Yates, Harry Sullivan—_

She promised him. She promised. She did.

“Why don’t you go read for a bit?” the Doctor suggests at last. “I do believe I saw some Bronte at the bottom of the pile.”

He wants her to smile. Is that what he wants? She can’t seem to make her face move. 

She promised.

She goes to the box, picks up a book, and sits down on the armchair to stare at the pages.

xxxxx

The Doctor sits down beside her and she starts, realizing simultaneously that she hadn’t heard him approach and that she can’t remember anything that happened on the last thirty pages. She has a brief irrational terror that he will ask her about the plot. She glances up at him quickly, then back down at the book: _My little songbird mustn’t ever do that again._ She has no idea who is saying it, or why.

“Any good?”

She shrugs. Her shoulder brushes his. The armchair is not large, and with both of them sitting there her legs are pressed firmly together, her left thigh against his, her right squashed against the armrest so that she can feel the wooden support through the thick cushion.

“How are you feeling?”

She shrugs again.

He lets his breath out slowly, through his teeth. Then:

“I always liked Ibsen. Contrary devil, but a charming fellow. One of the few of his time who really knew how to write a heroine.”

He reaches out, and touches her head. The tips of his fingers brush lightly over her hair. 

“What am I going to do with you, Miss Smith?”

He cups her cheek, and turns her face upward, towards him.

“No ideas today?”

She is not afraid of him in this moment. She has nothing left to give him, not even anger or fear.

_What do you want me to do?_

“Something, dammit!” The force of his words propels him up out of the chair. His shoulders tighten, and he whirls to face her again. “Hit me! Knock over a row of beakers! Shut yourself up in your bed scribbling an escape plan in your notebook! Don’t just sit there like a doll, like you’re already dead—”

The Doctor is shaking now, his face and his shoulders and his knees and his hands. He sinks to his knees in front of her, and she reaches out to touch his face. There is a rent in her chest, and it is widening. How can she do everything he wants her to do? She is already drowning, she is already struggling so hard to keep afloat, just to keep her promise. His face is cold against her hand. How can she explain to him?

She cannot.

His eyes close when she touches his cheek. A tremor runs through his body.

 _They were my friends,_ she says. There is nothing else to say. _They were my family._

“Oh, damn it all to—oh, very well!” 

And he tears away from her hand as though it burns. He stomps to the counter, grabs a long iron rod, and begins to slam it against the bars of their cell. “Guard! Guard!”

A thrill of alarm runs up her spine, and she hastens to him, tugs at the arm not holding the iron bar. _I wasn’t saying—I promised! I know I promised! You don’t have to—_

But he’s already pulling away from her, turning towards the camera. “I know you’re watching, Beth!” he roars. “You were right again, weren’t you? They’re never grateful!”

He throws the rod, and it arcs through the air, smashes into the wall and sends chips of stones flying.

“Well, what are you waiting for?”

He is a man possessed.

He turns to SJ, chest heaving with the force of his exertion, his fury. But his eyes… they are only…

“You may change your mind at any moment,” the Doctor says quietly, “and I will send her away. I don’t give a damn if she’s got the handcuffs on and she’s hauling you out the door, you say one word and the deal’s off.”

His words are trickling into her consciousness like slow-settling rain. Her hands are starting to shake, her thoughts jumbling helplessly, her heart is turning inside out. The Section Leader—but Sully—but The Room—but Andy—to know, to really know—but she promised and oh God the Room but to know—

A tear slips from her eye.

“Oh, oh, don’t. Please, Miss Smith.” He takes her wrist, his grip tight, his fingers curled over her pulse. He bends his head to catch her eye. “Have you changed your mind? Shall I tell Beth to go away?”

She shakes her head, nods, shakes her head again. Her fingers clench tight around his wrist of their own volition; she can feel her fingernails digging into his skin. She does not want him to release his grip. _It’s only—when I leave the cell? What can I do if I change my mind then?_

“Tell me. I will, of course, be coming with you.”

Her head jerks up, startled. _How—_

“It is my condition, and on this there will be no compromise.” He leans down, presses his forehead against hers. The sound of his breathing is ragged. “As I am always reminding you, you are not allowed to leave me.”

_Why are you doing this for me?_

“What choice do I have?” A bitter laugh, a choking sound. “I can’t lose you.”

_I promised—_

 

“You were already going away from me. Inside yourself.” A pause. “As Josie did. Before she…”

She squeezes his wrist to cut him off. She cannot hear this now. _Thank you._

Another tear slips down her cheek. He uses the fingers of his other hand to wipe it away. _They were your friends._

She catches that faint pastel outline from him again, that secondhand ache.

And then he puts that arm around her and pulls her close to him, her head against his chest, his head in the crook of her shoulder. Repeats one more time, whispering, in her ear: 

“You are not allowed to leave me.” 

xxxxx

The Section Leader is not enamored of the Doctor’s plan.

“The entire point of this endeavor was to secure a private interview,” she snaps. “Not to have you hovering about in the background, censoring any information she may wish to give about her general welfare.”

“Your concern is touching.”

“This is unacceptable—”

The Doctor folds his arms. “Then you had better change the venue of the interview, hadn’t you?”

“What on Earth are you getting at?”

“You know perfectly well. Whatever ghastly backdrop you had planned for this session, drop it. You will interview Miss Smith in your office, and I will be in the adjacent room behind the one-way mirror the Brigade Leader installed after that…unpleasantness…with the Duchess. You can cut the intercom if you like, but I will be watching to ensure Miss Smith’s safety.”

The Section Leader’s lips thin, and she taps her heel three times against the ground. “Oh, very well. If you insist. But you had better not fall behind on your schematics for the war satellites.”

She signals the guards, and they open the door, moving towards SJ—her heart hammers, they are holding handcuffs, they are reaching for her—

The Doctor steps in front of her.

“What now?” the Section Leader sighs, impatient.

“They will not touch her.”

The Section Leader raises an eyebrow. “I’m certainly not letting a terrorist outside her cell without proper restraints.”

“Neither you nor they will touch her. I will have your word, or we will go no further.”

The Section Leader sighs again, as though she is truly the most long-suffering soul in the universe. “You have my word, Doctor. I shall not touch a hair of your little plaything’s head.” She takes the handcuffs from the guard and dangles them towards him. “Now may we please proceed?”

The Doctor does not dignify this with a response, merely takes the handcuffs from Shaw and turns to SJ. “May I?”

Oh. Of course. He has to do it.

She holds out her hands in front of her, and the Doctor fastens the handcuffs loosely around them. The metal is cold, and heavy, and her hands tremble.

“Oh, come now, Doctor,” the Section Leader says. “A brawler would find those roomy. Her hands will slip right out.”

The Doctor tightens the handcuffs exactly one notch.

For a second the Section Leader looks tempted to continue pushing the issue, but then she nods to the guards, who spin the Doctor around and cuff him—his hands are put behind his back. 

And then they are walking out of the cell.

SJ feels dizzy the second she steps through the bars, as though she is entering another world. The cell has been her only world for so long. Everything else has taken on the consistency of dreams, and it’s dreams she’s stumbling through now, nightmares of dark hallways dripping with condensation and etched with frost, echoing footsteps. Everything is blurred with unreality, impossibility, too many new things, too quickly—and yet strange details leap out at her, seize her with familiarity—that broken light, fizzing and popping—those long scratches in the stone, stained dark, as if someone had held on until their fingernails broke and bled—the last time she saw these things, they were taking her downstairs, and she was dying—

SJ stumbles, fetching up against the Doctor; she grabs at his arm. She does not fall.

Up and up and up. How far have they come? Surely not so far. Surely not so far for her to be this dizzy, this light-headed from decreasing gravity. She is a satellite spinning out of orbit, becoming lost in space. Only the Doctor’s arm beneath her hand anchors her.

The Doctor is there. The Doctor is there. The Doctor is there.

And then the Section Leader brings them to a halt before a set of doors. The Doctor shifts, squeezes SJ’s hand.

“Well, Doctor,” Shaw says, indicating the left door with a sweep of her hand. “This is your stop.”

“After you,” the Doctor replies with mock chivalry, indicating the door to the right.

“Really, Doctor, I’m beginning to think you don’t expect me to live up to my end of the bargain.”

If they start to banter now, SJ will—not scream, that’s an impossibility now. She will implode, will fracture, will lose her nerve. She cannot, not now. Not when she is so close.

“No one could malign your adherence to the letter of an agreement,” the Doctor is saying. “But you cannot deny a certain slipperiness of the spirit. It would do my hearts a world of good to know that—”

“I gave you my word,” the Section Leader says, and her voice is ice, she is not even pretending to find him amusing now. “You have called me many things today, Doctor, all without punishment, but I will not stand for being called a liar.”

SJ feels something pass between the two of them, electric and invisible.

“We’ll go through together,” he says, and then he turns to SJ.

“I’ll be right here,” he says out loud, his eyes serious, and his hands on hers are transmitting, _If you need me, break something_. And below that, a hum, a buzz, that doesn’t quite clarify into words, _comebacktomecomebacktomecomebacktome_.

And just before he pulls away, she hears, _I didn’t like the way she looked at Josie._

xxxxx

“Well, you’ve cleaned up nicely,” the Section Leader says. “What a pretty little whore you make.”

The teacup rattles against the saucer in SJ’s hand.

The room is small, and dusty, and pink. Dark pink walls, the paint somewhere between fuchsia and vomit. The one-way mirror behind the Section Leader—smart, the Doctor won’t be able to read her lips. The requisite photograph of the Leader, and the other requisite photograph of her immediate superior, the Brigade Leader (slightly lower), and—and they’ve been moved recently, there are old nail holes inexpertly caulked in and a rectangle of darker, unfaded paint. Until recently, there was a third photograph…

She has been looking too long. She looks quickly back down at her hands in her lap, handcuffed in front of her, holding the saucer and the teacup and trying to hold perfectly still, don’t tremble _hold perfectly still—_

“It’s good to finally see your training paying off. My, it certainly took a lot to soften you up, didn’t it? Wore my poor little boys right out.”

Rough pink carpet a shade darker than the walls. Two fragile loveseats—stolen from one of the warehouses above?—with spindly legs and frayed floral cushions. SJ on one, the Section Leader across from her.

A low table between them, with a silver tea service. Probably also stolen from a dissident’s seized possessions.

“Tell me, who was your favorite? Anderson? Carter? Jones?”

And she has to bite her lip to keep from opening her mouth, Pavlovian response, confess confess confess—she has to spill lies from her lips so she will be safe, she has to say whatever it is the Section Leader wants to hear, the rising memory of The Room urging _say anything say anything say anything to make it stop to please them say what they want truth lies anything_.

“I think it must have been Anderson. You certainly squealed like a pig to slaughter when it was his turn. My boys do love a screamer.”

_say anything say anything don’t spill the tea whatever they want hold perfectly still say anything_

“What, no smart aleck replies? No scathing rejoinders? Why, Miss Smith—“

And she can hear the smile, dry and amused and on the edge of smug, in Section Leader Shaw’s voice:

“Cat got your tongue?”

Don’t look up. Looking up is a trap. Hold very still. If you hold very still, the predator may not see you. The predator already sees you. If you hold very still, the predator may become bored and let you go.

SJ’s fingers twitch on the handle of the teacup.

“In retrospect, I would have taken the entire arm,” the Section Leader says, as though she is discussing redecorating the room. “You adapted too quickly to the loss of your fingers; you didn’t give him a chance to pity you, didn’t let him help you.”

She looks SJ up and down again, nods, and takes a sip of her tea. “Yes, less damage to the face but I’d have taken the arm. Still, no point in crying over spilt milk.”

The predator sees you. There is no point pretending. Look up.

_Look up._

SJ looks up.

The Section Leader’s eyes are flecks of diamond.

“Curiosity finally won out, has it?” The Section Leader wags a finger, lips curling. “Patience, Miss Smith. I have a few things I wish to discuss first.”

She leans forward, and SJ flinches.

The Section Leader raises an eyebrow. “Oh ye of little faith. Didn’t you believe what I told the Doctor? I gave my word.” She slides the swagger stick from the loop on her belt. “What was it I said now? Oh yes, I promised not to touch you. Not a hair of your head. Didn’t I?” Her eyes harden. “You may nod, Miss Smith.”

Her head jerks down like a puppet’s on a string.

“Of course—” Shaw’s hand slides down the length of the swagger stick. “There is touching, and there is touching, isn’t there?” 

The swagger stick rises. SJ holds perfectly still as its end presses into the couch cushion, barely an inch from her shoulder.

“I’m not touching you now, am I?” The rod presses deeper into the fabric, makes a hissing sound as it slides down the velvet. “I’m not touching you at all.” The wood scratches against the cloth as it skirts SJ’s knee. “He’s watching right now. What do you think is going through that mind of his, Miss Smith?” The tip traces around the edges of her bare feet, slides up through the air, barely a hair’s breadth from the fabric of her trousers. “What do you think your Doctor’s thinking, as he watches me…” up and up the swagger sticks climbs “…so very carefully…” SJ must hold perfectly still “… _not_ touching you?”

The swagger stick pauses in its progress.

The Section Leader produces a cigarette from nowhere, lights it one-handed. Leans forward and slowly, a parody of tenderness, blows the smoke towards SJ’s face. The warmth of the smoke ghosts over her cheek, a momentary caress. “Well, Miss Smith?”

SJ is trying not to cough. She is trying not to look away from the Section Leader’s face, the other woman’s eyes alight with a strange fire. 

“You may answer, Miss Smith.”

Very carefully, trying not to tremble and spill her cup, SJ raises her shoulders, and lowers them.

The Section Leader lets the end of the stick drop; sinks back into her seat, a satisfied cat-that-got-the-cream smile on her face. “Drink your tea.”

It is bitter, and burns her lips as it slips past them, the tannic taste drying out her tongue even as she swallows.

“You don’t trust him fully to protect you. You are a clever girl then.” Inhale, and then exhale, that long stream of blue-grey smoke. Her eyes still alight, her mouth still smiling. Her eyes still measuring. “And that makes you worth something to me, unlike your predecessor.” Her lips twist. “That pathetic little traitor would have spread her legs for a pat on the head and a word of praise. _Two_ words and she’d have sucked his cock into the bargain. Heaven only knows what she would’ve done for three; probably thrown herself into a volcano.”

The Section Leader’s eyes have become slightly unfocused during this monologue, gazing back into the past, and SJ dares a glance at the folder on the table between them, the slip of paper peeking out from it.

The Section Leader sees.

“All in good time, Miss Smith.” The Section Leader refills SJ’s cup, the brown liquid bubbling, the china heating in her hand. “I wasn’t consulted about her suitability, you know—never mind that I was the only one with any firsthand experience of his temperament or his inclinations. Men! They thought any little chit would do. And so they purchased him a pretty bauble that he could set on a shelf and admire. He couldn’t do anything more—he might break a fragile, fine-spun thing like her, and oh, that would _never_ do to have on his conscience.” Her smile is hard, her smile is cold. “But with someone already broken—someone to he could take apart, always intending to fix her later—” her voice is bitter, bitter, bitter—“oh, he could have no qualms about someone like that! What _projects_ he will have in mind for you!”

The twist of her mouth on ‘projects,’ almost a snarl, makes SJ’s stomach turn over. It must show on her face, because the Section Leader laughs. It is derisive, but somehow, also…forced?

“Yes, I’d thought you’d have that reaction.” She leans forward. “My, you can’t stand the thought of being someone’s project, can you? It makes your blood run cold, knowing you’re part of someone else’s plan, realizing that what you want isn’t the center of the universe. You and all your self-centered little friends.”

She slaps the hand with the cigarette down on the folder, the ash scattering, and SJ’s eyes dart back down to it, but Section Leader Shaw is not yet ready to divulge its contents. She is leaning forward, her eyes boring into SJ’s.

“Do you know where I grew up, Miss Smith? The banks of the Thames. You dissidents—spoiled little children, the lot of you. You never think how lucky you’ve had it.” She sneers. “Oh, poor you, growing up in a scientific labor camp, coddled and kept safe from the cold and the hunger, from the criminals and the terrorists you so romanticize. You don’t know what it’s like to have to scrounge in the garbage for a bite of moldy bread to eat, only to have it snatched from your hand by someone bigger and stronger. To know that you will live and _die_ there, in that _squalor_ , unless the government manages to snatch _one second_ from tracking down troublemakers like you to implement one of its humanitarian programs!”

SJ is not going to look at the mirror. She is not going to look at the mirror. She is not going to let Section Leader Shaw know how very, very much she wants the Doctor to come get her right now.

The Section Leader’s voice is shaking now, but her frame is deadly still, a cobra poised to strike. She is hissing her words:

“We didn’t have the luxuries you did—what was it your Aunt Lavinia got for you for your ninth birthday, a purple bicycle with streamers?”

SJ starts. It had been a purple bicycle, with blue streamers, and suddenly she can see it as though it is in front of her, can feel the rubber grips beneath her hands, smell the oil—how did the Section Leader know—

Sectin Leader smirks. “Oh yes, and a complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and a bag of peppermints.” Her voice drips sarcasm: “Oh, the hardship. How oppressed you were.”

She leans in further still, her voice low and swift and sharp. “Do you know what I got for my ninth birthday, Miss Smith?” Her eyes not leaving SJ’s for a second. “Far more than I ever expected. I expected nothing. What could my father afford? The factories perpetually empty, bombed by dissidents. The unemployment lines clogged with whinging freeloaders, wanting something for nothing. My father never complained. My father was a loyal citizen. He reported my mother when I was five, for seditious talk against the state. And what from his reward, from our neighbors, from the very people who should have been glad to have a traitor removed from their midst? They set fire to our shelter! The idiocy—the ingratitude—”

The Section Leader’s free hand is clenching and unclenching around the swagger stick. Smoke billows from her mouth, a lock of hair sticking to the edge of her lips, her eyes flaming, and SJ realizes with a chill that shivers up her spine and reverberates down into her hands that this woman is completely insane.

The cup and saucer rattle in her hand. If she drops it now…

But the Section Leader doesn’t notice. This time, she is firmly in the past, even as she stares SJ down as if trying to slice her through with her eyes.

“But on the banks of the Thames my father found a wounded eagle, and in the trash he found a dented birdcage, and on my ninth birthday he gave them to me. And it meant more than you will _ever_ know.”

The chill is spreading, vibrating through SJ’s every nerve. Gooseflesh prickles. She can feel the frigid air on every centimeter of exposed skin. 

“But the eagle wouldn’t eat. The eagle would not drink. After a few days, the eagle would not even lash out when we tended its wounds. It would not even scream.

“Do you know what I did then, Miss Smith?”

She is so cold. She cannot think. The cold is stabbing through the thin cotton weave of her clothes like dozens of icy knives.

Beth Shaw takes a long drag on her cigarette, and then smiles, beatific. “I found a sparrow.”

 _Sparrow_ and the sound of it echoes in her head, spirals, like the pattern of a wing, no, a feather, no, flight—

Something is wrong, when something went wrong she was supposed to—

“As long as the sparrow bobbed and fluttered in fear, the eagle sat and watched it. Was content to eat only the mice and rats I brought. But one day the sparrow sat still, and the eagle—more than full—lashed it to ribbons. It could not help it. It was a bird of prey. It was what it was made for. But do you know, that eagle mourned its little cellmate. It grew still yet again. And it died not long after.

“Do you take my meaning, Miss Smith?”

Does she? Something is—she has to hold onto the cup. It’s hard to hold onto the cup because she is shaking—if she holds onto the Section Leader’s voice—the lights, even the lights are cold, burning cold…

“If you submit, the Doctor will destroy you. Not by violence, as the eagle did. But he will destroy you nonetheless. He will take you apart, piece by piece. He will not be able to help it.”

SJ cannot look away from the Section Leader’s eyes. The Section Leader’s eyes are gleaming. They are filling her vision. They are filled with lights, and all the lights are connected, and something is—

“Oh, he has all the very best of intentions. He will always have reasons. He will always have excuses, and explanations, and soft words to erode your resolve. He has all the time in the world and you have none, do you understand? You have begun to accede to his requests, and if you do not stop, _he_ will not stop, until every part of you belongs to him, until you are wholly his creature, until you cannot extricate any part of you from him. You will cease to struggle, and you will be destroyed, and when he sees that you are destroyed he will die, and for the good of the country _I cannot not allow that to happen.”_

All the lights are connected, and they spark—

_If you need me--_

Cold and they spark, hold onto the voice, _something I was supposed to do_ , blue, oh they spark—

“Would you like me to save you?”

Yes, yes, she would like to be saved. But she has to—

The teacup falls from her hand, oh thank goodness, it will shatter on the floor and the Doctor will—

The Section Leader catches it.

“I’m not ready for you to take your leave just yet. I need an answer.”

The Doctor was going to…but the Section Leader caught the tea…something in the tea—even her blood is running cold through her veins, she sees all the connections now, they are spreading and multiplying and tangling and they will strangle her if she does not hold onto

(she held onto the Doctor’s arm)

the voice, the voice, any voice…

“You need my help.”

_help_

“Even you can’t be so blind not to see what’s happening. Oh, I’m sure you managed to justify it the first time.” Her face is swimming in SJ’s vision. Her tongue darts out over her lips. “He is so very fascinating when he’s helpless—though it can be interesting to let him take charge from time to time. But you don’t feel that way, do you? Not with your horror of being a project. And still you gave in last night, and took him to your bed. Because you are the sparrow, and you cannot keep constantly moving. You were tired. You had no choice.”

Words, and words, and words—there were words she wanted to—words she needed to—

SJ points her shaking hand towards the folder. Her fingers just touch the edge, if she could just make them bend—

The words—

“Greedy little bitch.” Her voice dispassionate again, suddenly. The Section Leader flicks the folder towards SJ and the blank white piece of paper inside flies free, twists and turns slow-motion into the air before her eyes like a taunting dove.

(‘failure’ says the piece of paper with its ripped folded mouth)

her fingers are ice

(she hears it say ‘failure’)

_Andy Sully sorry Audrey Dottie Fitzoliver oh no_

“There’s nothing in there. The real folder was delivered to the Doctor—” the Section Leader bends her head to check her watch, and for SJ, the whole room slides up and down like the tide—“three minutes ago.”

_The Doctor was supposed to stay with me_

(the doctor lies)

connect the lights

(all lies)

spark blue

“ I’m giving you something far more valuable: the knowledge of what he’ll do with that information, how much he’ll share with you, how much you’ll have to bargain for. What you’ll have to bargain with.”

she is frozen and shaking and all the colors of the room are melting, dripping pink like viscous organs, and everyone’s minds are sparking blue (the section leader and the doctor and the guards and all the lights voices too many and) and tilting tilting to fall she was never strong enough—

_Aunt Lavinia it wasn’t like you said why did you leave me all alone_

“And I’m still waiting for an answer, little sparrow. Would you like me to save you?”

Oh yes, please. Someone, anyone. Oh god oh god please please please…

SJ nods.

And then she is falling, falling, down into the threadbare pink carpet, her face against the rough fibers, and the lights spark blue and she hears everything all the voices everywhere and she understands and the dragons hiss and squirm through the holes in reality, and from far above her—a thousand miles away, up above her in the well in the center of the Universe from which the gods draw the waters of Time—comes the Section Leader’s voice, musing: 

“Do you know some of my colleagues prefer to interrogate men? I confess I find it rather boring. Men rage and struggle and strain, and snap. They break themselves completely in one blow. But women…

“Women _bend.”_


	8. Chapter 8

Light. Black. Light. 

Flickering over her eyelids, down down down, it’s all happening again, bumping against—

Darkness. Light. Darkness.

Light.

Darkness…

Slap! And the Doctor hand connects, stinging hard, with her cheek, sparks going off in her head—

“I forbid you to go to sleep. Do you hear me? Hold on, hold on, just a little longer—”

Her head falls back down against his shoulder. The sting in her skin already fading beneath the (sting at the back of her throat) jolting wheels in her mind, the crushing pressure on her back (the Doctor is carrying her—where are his handcuffs—where are her—

She has to hold on or she will fall, fly out of his arms, hurtling, they are hurtling, spiral down down down darkness…

“No!”

And his hand yanks hard in her hair, a red flash of piercing pain, and she remembers his hands—he burst through the door with the handcuffs still hanging from one wrist and the metal banged into her temple as he grabbed her hair to pull her up _(Anderson grabs her hair in The Room and pulls her down)_ from the floor and he shoved the fingers of his other hand into her mouth and down her throat, shouting blaring-white words that flared and faded into the walls, about flawed hypotheses and pushing things too far, and the tea came up, fire-burning, and the food came up over his finger and onto the carpet and—

_With a basal metabolic rate from the Cunningham formula, she still has—_

The voices, and the memories, and no lines in between, no borders, she is falling into the Doctor, his shoulder and his mind, all the edges of things are melting…

She is cold and the Doctor is warm and that’s (bad) impossible _(if he feels warm think how cold you must be)_ and all the edges are melting until there is nothing left, that’s what the Section Leader said, nothing left _(‘it took a lot to soften you up’ and a pleasant soft buzz inside her head watching the poison flower quiver beneath the butterfly and whispering silently ‘drink drink drink’)_

Darkness…

Slap!

Light.

“You—“

Darkness.

Slap!

“Are—”

Slap!

Light.

“Not—”

Darkness—

Slap!

“Allowed—“

CRASH! And the cell door slams open with the sound of the world breaking, metal against metal _(against bone, the sounds of hammer against bone, saws against—she screams and it echoes, rattles the metal instruments in their tray)_ and time skips like a rock over water and—

Bed, with the pillows and blanket rising up around her like soft mountains, and everything is red, bathed in scarlet from the shining dragon eye that hangs over her and the Doctor is crawling under the covers and pulling her against his chest and stroking her skin where he hit her and rubbing her arms down to her fingers _restore circulation get the blood flowing_ and it makes ripples in the fabric of time, and he is saying “Now you can” _sleep_ “now, now, it’s all right” _I’m so sorry_ “I can help you” _do you want me to_ “help you” _sleep_ “I can” _help you_ “make you” _warm inside your head if I just reach in, just reach in to help you—_

(“Would you like me to save you?” whispers Beth Shaw in the bed, stroking her hair)

“Ssh, shh, I won’t—” and his hands are on her back now, over the fabric of her shirt, her head pressed into the fabric of his shirt, no skin touching, so why can she still hear everything, why can she still hear the whole universe—

“Shh, shh. Still now. I won’t. Sssh.”

Shivering, shaking, her whole body shaking apart, teeth chattering like they’re going to leap out of her skull, her fingers twitching helpless unable to let go of him when he is so warm—when she can melt into him because he’s so warm—

“It’s all right. It’s all right. The shivering means you’re getting back to normal temperature. You’ll be all right.”

And the dragons crawl out of the cracks of the universe where he broke it when he slammed open the door and she sees them reaching for him, claws and fangs snaking sideways through the gaps in time, crawling up out of the well, reaching for him to rip him to shreds and take him away, and she clutches him to her, _you can’t have him he’s mine—_

“Sssh. Sssh. I’m right here. I’m all right. I’m right here.”

She wants to tell him—him, something, she wants to tell—oh god, she’s so cold, she’s ice and he’s warm—her eyelids heavy, all her limbs heavy, but he’ll hurt her if she lets herself keep falling, he did, he is, he will, he promised not to but…

His hands rubbing her hands, his thumb pressing deep as it sweeps wrist to knuckles, wrist to knuckles.  
“Sssh. You can go to sleep now. I won’t force you. But you can.”

Darkness. Light. She wants so badly to be warm. The only, only, only thing she wants. Darkness…

“Sssh. Sssh, Sarah Jane.”

xxxxx

_It is that night after the Manchester disaster where they nearly all died, and Dottie and Audrey are asleep on the mattress before the crackling fireplace, Fitzoliver’s small frame curled in his sleeping bag as close to the heat of the flames as he can get, and they are all alive where she can see them, and she and Andy and Sully are piled in a heap on the couch, careful of Andy’s leg, toasty-warm and lazy and cozy as they hold each other, SJ’s lips holding the frost-chill of the air for just a second before she kisses Andy and they are warm, she kisses Sully and they are warm again, she shifts in the slowly swelling tide of blankets to let them kiss and she is warm deep in her chest and down to her toes, her best friends, her very best friends…_

_The Doctor is sitting in his green armchair, next to the couch. He is holding someone in his lap._

_“It was just kissing,” she says. “It was just a bit of comfort. It wasn’t like she said it was, in The Room.”_

_“It’s only biology,” he says. “You needn’t be ashamed.”_

_“Is this a dream?”_

_He looks away from her, into the fire. “I helped her sleep, and I gave her sweet dreams.” His hand comes up to cup the head of the girl in his lap, fine golden hair spilling over his fingers. “And then I helped her sleep a little longer. And a little longer.”_

xxxxx

Reality is whole again.

She feels this even before she opens her eyes, and when she opens her eyes the bed and the blankets are a solid warm cocoon woven around her, and she does not feel herself sinking into the Doctor where she is pressed against his chest, or where his arms wrap like iron around her back, or where his legs have pinned hers together. She can feel him breathing, and hear it, but the only voice in her head is her own. There are no sparking lights, melting walls, or dragons coming to take him away.

She is pressed so close to him that her eyelashes brush against the weave of his shirt, and her breath bounces back to her, hot and dizzying in the confined space.

SJ tries to shift, and the Doctor’s arms tighten around her.

She tries again, and it’s not an illusion, the Doctor is holding her there on purpose. SJ draws in as deep a lungful of air as she can, counts to ten. Lets the air out slowly, willing her heart to a steady rhythm. Shifts again, just enough to bring the top of her head to his neck.

 _You’re crushing me,_ she says. _I just need a bit of air_.

He flips her around, his arms snapping back firm and rigid around her waist.

The Doctor doesn’t seem in the mood for conversation, so SJ takes a moment to savor the touch of cool air on her face, and her ability to draw it deep into her lungs, and the way the whole world is being solid and holding still. A few inches from her face lies a spoon stained brown with tannin, and she flashes to a memory: her back against the Doctor’s chest as he leans against the headboard, one hand tipping her head back to make her swallow as the other guided the spoon back her lips, the burning hot liquid on her tongue, the bitter taste of weak tea, the dragon’s eye glaring down red—

The spoon and the sheets and her hands still have an odd reddish cast.

A little twist of her head—the Doctor’s legs lock even tighter—and she sees the jerry-rigged heat lamp hanging above them. Another memory leaps up like a splash of water out of a stream: the plug sliding in to the socket and the bulb blazing with light and then a loud pop! As sparks flew and everything outside the bed-curtain plunged into blackness…

And then the Doctor crawling back into bed with her, asking her if…

 _You wanted to go inside my head. To keep me warm._ Her heart is speeding up again.

“I didn’t, though,” he says. His voice is shocking in the still air. “I took your attempt to claw my eyes out as a ‘no.’”

SJ doesn’t remember that, only him asking and then a burst of light, like a bursting of herself, bursting outward like breaking glass, breaking—

_Did I hurt you?_

“Just the hand. It’ll heal.”

She glances downward; jagged teeth-marks ring his fingers. He’d forced those fingers down her throat and she’d gagged, biting down hard—

_Sorry._

“It’s nothing.”

He’s being too brisk, too dismissive, even while his unyielding arms and legs are pinning her in place as though he’s some sort of demented starfish.

The image makes her smile for a second, and keep her heart steady. SJ tries again. _You feel like you’re burning up._

“I can control my body temperature. It’s how I kept you halfway stable on the way down here.”

 _That and slapping me silly._ Silence. Maybe that’s pushing him too far. _Is it safe? For you_?

“More than seven hours means a headache. Vascular difficulties with the cranial arteries.” His arms press around her like a vise, pressure straight through muscle to bone. He is not letting go anytime soon. “You still have a few degrees to go until your temperature is normal.”

On cue, a shiver vibrates up SJ’s spine and down her arms. The Doctor flips her back towards him, her face mashed back into the fabric of his shirt with no ceremony or warning. 

SJ grits her teeth and nudges her head up a hair harder than necessary, making the necessary skin contact to talk and, incidentally, striking a sharp blow against his chin with her skull. _You needn’t be such a boor about it. Not as if I’ve anywhere to run, is it?_

The Doctor responds directly neither to the assault nor to her words. Instead he shifts, the arm under her diving under the pillow. She hears the crinkle of foil, and then his other hand comes around with her piece of chocolate, melting where it touches his fingers. He brings it towards her mouth.

SJ presses her lips shut, turns her face into the mattress.

“You’ve lost a day’s worth of rations. Humans are furnaces. You need fuel.”

 _But I don’t need someone to shovel the coal in_ , she retorts. _I can feed myself now, thank you._

The sound of grinding teeth, a huff, and then he raises his right arm, freeing her left. Still holding her so firmly that she cannot look up to see his face.

Not an ideal treaty, but a step. She takes the chocolate with her three fingers; her hands are still shaking a little but after all this time her grip is less awkward than it could be. She eats slowly, wary of the low seething of still-settling acid in her stomach, and also trying to buy time as she considers the Doctor’s behavior.

What’s gotten into him?

She licks the chocolate from her fingers, wipes them on his sleeve. Even that doesn’t get a twitch away from him. 

She lets her touch fall a few inches to his skin.

_What she dosed me with—same as you?_

“Yes.” He’s gruff, impatient; for a moment she thinks that’s all she’s going to get, and then he adds, grudgingly: “It seemed to metabolize much more quickly in you than she suspected. She must not have done other trials on humans.” His voice goes dry. “I do keep telling her I’m not an adequate test subject.”

She presses her forehead against his chest, tries to make that say what she can’t.

He doesn’t say anything either. Damn. 

Time for another tack.

_The folder--_

A long intake of breath. “I don’t have it.”

It’s like a punch to her chest, shards of collarbone and rib fracturing inward to pierce her heart. _She lied about that too._

“I was about to open it,” he said. “And then you dropped the cup.”

And she can’t cry, because she’s been scoured and emptied and all that’s left of her is this shell, this hollow thing that the Doctor is holding onto so tightly she may shatter.

“I dropped it,” she hears him say, above her. “I did not even think to look down.” And his arms are squeezing her tight again, forcing her arms back against her sides, his hands shaking where they grip at her back. _Beth has all the cards_. “You are not leaving this room ever again.” 

No, not hollow, not entirely.

There is still fear.

His right arm is pressed against her left; there is still contact. She is not going to panic. She is bound but not gagged. Deep breaths.

The Doctor is panicking right now. She cannot panic too.

Bad things happen when they both panic.

She takes in a deep breath, and then another. Wills her heart to a steady, even beat. Wills her eyes to dry. Wills—in the privacy of her own mind, without sending the thought—the Doctor to listen, to feel, to calm down.

His hands stop shaking—after a seconds? A few minutes? Longer?—and his breathing becomes less ragged, but he shows no inclination of letting go.

Okay. Fine. She can do this. She can. 

Sarah Jane sends a thought: _If you’re planning on keeping me here forever, I hope you remember that we mere humans do occasionally need to use the loo._

No response.

_Doctor?_

_Doctor, that was your cue to tell me you’re not planning to keep me here forever._

A grunt. “Considering it.”

He’s talking. That’s good. Focus on the fact that he’s talking, not what he’s saying. Focus.

_It’s your charming moods like these that make the Section Leader’s offer halfway tempting._

She waits, but there’s no response. 

_Not the least bit curious about that?_

Silence. Damn. Okay, fine. She takes a deep breath. Time to bring out the big guns:

_She wants me to spy on you, you know._

No comment.

He doesn’t even twitch.

_It’s ridiculous, of course._

“You must do what you think is right.”

SJ is flabbergasted.

_What—you think I’m going to—_

“You forget, I could see your face the entire time.” His voice is bitter cold. “I’m fairly certain that was a gesture of assent at the end.” 

SJ feels as though the bed is falling out from under her. His words ring hollow and distant in her ears. This is worse than she thought, this is so much worse— _She drugged me! The walls were melting and I was hearing voices! I wasn’t exactly in a fit state to make a contract!_

“You’ve made rather a point of keeping your word in the past.”

 _You’re twisting it all_ — She forces herself to take a breath. _Promises with you_ matter. 

“Oh, really?”

 _YES._ She is pushing sincerity at him, trying to hold her mind open: see, see, see, there is nothing that I am hiding, see! _Promises_ mean _things to you. Even if you broke one, it would_ mean _something._

“Don’t flatter me. You’re not terribly good at it.”

SJ huffs through gritted teeth. _Purely on the merits then. Who would I be more likely to side with: the person who slapped me around a bit to keep me from passing out, or the person who chose what size hammer to have my fingers smashed with?_

His hand slips to hers, just for a second. He pulls it back.

She can still feel those missing fingers, sometimes, the pain, as if she could look down and see them hanging there, useless strips of meat and bone. Other times they feel clenched tight, as though they are trying to force the rest of her hand into an angry fist. 

SJ uses her anger to shove herself up onto her elbow, meet his eyes.

_Oh, have I mentioned that she had me violated with a broom handle when her lackeys couldn’t perform? You think I’d work with her against you? I wouldn’t work with her on a flower arrangement!_

He doesn’t meet her eyes. His voice is hoarse. “She’s the one with more power. She could make things easier for you.”

 _Oh, for—_ Sarah flops down, facing away from him. _Do you have to be so pig-headed?!_ Tears are stinging her eyes, fighting to push through. _The Section Leader poisoned me and you’re making it into a popularity contest. I don’t believe you._

Her throat seizes up on a long choked gasp, all the words she can’t speak, and the tears come again. He didn’t used to be able to make her cry. She gave him that power, stupid, stupid, stupid. She let his books and his sharing and his helplessness that one night convince her that he was different. Oh, if she could swallow this lump in her throat, this heavy black weight in her stomach, sinking. Ashes in her mouth. If she could just stop caring again.

“Sarah—”

But she pulls away from him. He’s not letting go, but she can get out of reach of his skin. She can lean away, limp and heavy in his arms, and build a smooth marble barrier around her mind, never let him in, never let him in, never—

“Sarah, I was—”

Smooth marble around her mind, body still as stone, when you hold yourself still as stone they can’t touch you, not really, they can do whatever they want but inside you stay frozen and still and empty and far away and they can never get at you, at your heart—

“It’s only that—that I failed to protect you.”

He’s silent, expectant. She’s stone, stone, stone, he’s water seeking out fractures but she won’t let him in to crack her apart, she won’t listen—

“And I wouldn’t blame you for rethinking matters.”

She won’t care. She won’t.

“I’m sorry.”

NO. No no no. He is not getting out of this so easily. He called her a liar. He thought she might _betray_ him, after she _promised_. She is not going to care. 

“It’s just—I have grown used to this cell, this—this world. It is a world all by itself, and it has rules, and—and you do not follow them. You are so often too good to be true. You engage in acts of—of reckless goodness. When you pushed me out of the way of that acid—“

 _That was just instinct._ Her hand slaps up and the words pop out to correct him before she can stop them.

She can almost hear the raised eyebrow. _So the fact that you’re instinctually good—_

 _It’s not like that!_ Her fists clench. It’s a trap to keep talking, she knows that, but that words spill out. _I was part of a_ team. _We had to act to protect each other without hesitating. I was just—used to that._

“If you insist,” the Doctor says. He closes his hand on hers before she can pull it back. “Of course, you can hardly claim instinct as an alibi for nursing me back to health.” His thumb strokes over her knuckles. “You could have cut my throat, you know. I couldn’t have stopped you.” 

_It occurred to me._

“But you didn’t. The monstrous dragon was revealed as a helpless, pathetic old man, and you didn’t seek revenge. I was cold, and—”

 _I didn’t do it for you._ She twists angrily in his arms. _I did it because if you died, my head was going to be next on the chopping block. I thought about letting you die. Or hurting you. I weighed the options. I made a choice. It has nothing to do with ‘good.’_

“Very well, have it both ways,” the Doctor says. How does he manage to sound smug and humble at the same time? “It was a poor excuse for my behavior anyhow.”

SJ clenches her jaw and doesn’t respond.

Slowly, so slowly, like the shifting of thawing ice, the Doctor runs his hand up her arm, and then loosens his grip.

He pulls his legs back from around hers until his knees only nudge against the backs of hers, a cotton whisper of movement.

His hand touches hers, rests there lightly, and she knows his hesitation is his asking for forgiveness. 

She lets out a long breath.

 _Our next project should be the communications array,_ she says instead. _We can’t focus too much on weapons; they’ll get suspicious._

 _Any particular malfunction you had in mind?_ he asks.

_‘Upgraded’ security measures the resistance already knows how to bypass should do the trick._

“Very well.” He is silent for a few moments. _Before we proceed, however, I think we should ask ourselves why the Section Leader did this to you in the first place._

_Didn’t we just go through this? She got me to agree to spy on you._

_Using a brute force method I would have expected from the Brigade Leader, not her. Beth does nothing without a reason. Usually more than one._

A flush of anger rises in SJ’s chest. _If you’re saying it’s my fault, that I made her—_

“Of course not!” And then, gently: _I know what Beth is. I have not blinded myself to that fact. Whatever my other feelings, I know what she is, and I will not abandon you for her._

 _You’ve answered your own question._ SJ stares at the beige curtain in front of her, lit blood-red by the heat lamp. _She did it to hurt you._

_Me?_

_That was all a show she put on for you, in case you missed that. It was called “I’ve Noticed You Like This Thing and I Thought You Should Know I Can Break It Anytime I Feel Like It.”_

“Jealousy. The least logical of all emotions.” The Doctor’s hand settles more firmly onto hers. “In that case, it would also be a test: what do I do in response? How much value do I place on your wellbeing?” 

SJ considers, nods. _You know her. How do we play it?_

“It’s important to send across just the right response.” _Too much emotional attachment threatens her ability to control me. Too little and you lose your effectiveness as her pawn._

He tries to block the mental image from passing through, but she manages to grab a piece. It’s her, thin and pale, a trickle of blood at the corner of her mouth.

There is the prohibition against touching her, but as SJ’s seen, there are ways around that. A mold in the ventilation shafts, the thermostat down a few degrees, and nature will do the work for the Section Leader, untraceable.

 _I’ve decided to spy on you,_ SJ says, and ignores that start his hand gives. _You’re suspicious, and not letting me out of your sight. You tear up anything I write that doesn’t look like lab notes. Cunningly, however, I manage to conceal several pages of completely legitimate observations on your mental state and suspected escape plans, which I pass to Beth the next time she comes down here to make veiled threats._

 _Neatly balanced,_ the Doctor says. _But how will my ‘suspicion’ square with the several hours of nurse-maiding on videotape?_

_Obviously once it was clear I was out of the woods, you raped me so I would know exactly who I belonged to._

She has to swallow after she says that. It’s too soon, still. It’s too close.

Her heart is beating very, very fast. The heart of a sparrow.

“Ah,” he says. He sounds as though he has been kicked in the solar plexus. “Obviously.”

 _It’s what she expects to happen,_ SJ argues. _Better than that, it’s what she_ wants _to happen. She wouldn’t call it rape—she call it ‘discipline’ or something—but she wants it to happen. Because—then you’ll be more like her. And if we give her what she wants…she won’t look too closely._

He sucks in a breath through his teeth and SJ feels her fingernails bite into her palms as her fists clench. Please let him not argue, please let him not pry, she can’t look directly at the thing in the back of her head right now, The Room, she can’t she can’t she can’t—

“You’re right,” he says at last. “It’s the sort of violent puerile reaction she can understand. Her whole social order is based on it.”

_And if I’m to stay distant and skittish from now on, you should probably repeat the performance._

She feels a tremor run down his body. _If we must._

SJ traces a spiral on his palm. _If I’m up for…visiting, I’ll draw this in the notes, alright?_

_Of course. You’re certain this charade won’t—you’re certain you’ll be all right?_

_I’ll make you tell me lots of stories._ She flashes suddenly to the Section Leader’s face staring down at her, and flinches. _Nothing about birds, though._

_What?_

_The Section Leader—she told me a story. About her childhood, I think, but also us… I think._ SJ bites her lip, trying to pull the specifics out of the morass of yesterday’s memory. _I was a sparrow. You were a bird of prey._

_Ah. Yes, she’s told me a variation of that one as well._

And there it is. Another contract settled between them. Now to see if they can go twenty-four hours without either of them renegotiating.

SJ leans back into the Doctor a little, lets herself just listen to the sound of their breathing, the slight rustle of the blanket and sheets as they breathe.

Both alive, after all. Both alive, and trying to work together. And warm.

His thumb strokes over her wrist. _Your temperature’s almost back to normal. I should be able to let you alone in just a minute._

 _You don’t have to._ It comes out before she even knows it’s there. She forges ahead. _I mean, not if you’re going to get a headache. But if you could stay a little less than that—you could._

He draws up, and she can feel him studying her even as she stares resolutely away. “Your pulse is even,” he says after awhile. “It’s spiked when you’ve gotten angry or upset, but I’m still touching you now and it’s even. Your muscle tone is relaxed, not tense or dead weight. You distrust proximity because of recent experience, but on a biological level—humans are pack animals, aren’t they?”

His voice is smugly pedantic, verging on condescending, and she twists as if to get away. Not as hard as she could, just enough to tell him to shut up.

_I’ve bitten you before and I’ll bite you again, she says._

“It’s only biology,” he says softly. The smugness gone. “There’s nothing wrong with wanting contact.”

Her cheeks are burning. _I’ve changed my mind. You can leave straightaway._

He sighs, and shifts away from her, sitting up. “All right.” 

Her hand leaps up to grab his. His hand is large in her hand, and callused, and cooling rapidly. She still can’t turn to look at him.

_She said—Beth said you’d devour me._

It is not forgiveness. It is not an apology. It is almost an explanation, but it is not quite that either.

It is the only thing she can give him.

He leans back down for a moment; for a second she thinks he is going to kiss her hair. “She thought you were a sparrow,” he whispers. “She makes mistakes.” And then he is pulling away, rising. “Come along when you’re ready, Sparrowhawk.”

xxxxx

She spends a few minutes steeling herself for her role, reminding herself of how to act and reminding herself that it won’t be real. She’s not certain which will be harder.

At first she thinks the clanking of boots is just another patrol, but it stops too soon, too suddenly, and there is the Doctor’s voice and the guard’s replies too soft for her to hear and she panics, what if the Section Leader’s already suspicious and they’ve come for the Doctor, what if they’re taking him away to be punished—

Irrational panic propels her out of bed, almost tripping on the curtain, just in time to see the Doctor slip two sheets of paper between the iron bars, the guard taking them before he stalks away.

The Doctor turns to glare at her, and that’s her cue—she backs up a step. 

And it’s not entirely on purpose, it’s not entirely performance, but she has to remind herself to keep it that way.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” he snaps. “If you’re quite done licking your wounds, the security system testing has fallen abominably behind.”

SJ beats a quick retreat to the counter with the alarm systems they’d begun testing a week ago, snagging her notebook on the way. The Doctor follows, setting up shop next to her, muttering under his breath as he tears apart their half-completed prototype. If they’re to sabotage this right, they’ll have to start all over.

Below the counter, her right hand taps his side, Morse code:

**What was that all about?**

He lets his left hand drop, she takes it.

_I’m sending Beth a message._

_I saw you hand over two._

_Ah, well, if I only sent the message to Beth, she might decide not to open it for a few weeks, just to let me squirm. And then she wouldn’t know what I was doing. You see, any communication I send to Section Leader Shaw is intercepted by Brigade Leader Lethbridge-Stewart, just as any message I might send to the Brigade Leader is read by Section Leader. Isn’t love grand?_

SJ frowns; he’s dancing around the heart of the matter. _What did these messages say?_

_The same thing in different ways. I let the Brigade Leader know that a certain person who has recently fallen from favor in the eyes of the the State has not entirely fallen from the favor of Elizabeth Shaw, and might indeed be in higher favor with her than he. And I let Beth know that she talks in her sleep, and that interfering with you has very swift consequences._

Her heart is pounding. _What do you mean?_

_She hurt someone that I value. I have just done the same._

His face has gone still and cold and very far away from her. 

SJ cannot let him stay there.

She tugs his hand to bring him back. _Come along, Doctor. We’ve work to do._


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A shorter update this time. Messing around with style, playing with dialogue and repetition and withholding information (I felt like I was starting to come down with explain-everything-itis). We'll see how it goes

_Why does your heart sound so different?_

_Which one?_

xxxxx

He’s nervous, the first time, which helps her not be.

He knocks at the edge of the headboard, and she pulls aside the curtain to let him in. He sits on the edge of the bed. The very edge. He does not look her in the eye.

“I’ve adjusted the lighting,” he says. His fingers are laced together, and he twists them back and forth as he looks down on them. “Our shadows won’t be quite as distinct. It should assist in…fudging the data.”

She moves to the other side of the bed. Lies back down. Crosses her arms, and watches him.  
He gets on his hands and knees next to her. “The important thing is the silhouette,” he says gruffly, and she realizes—the thought startling, a sudden-blooming flower—

He hates this. He hates this so, so much.

She touches his wrist.

_Would you rather I didn’t look?_

Something happens in his face, something new. A flash, a dawning, and it’s gone.

“Please.”

She watches the shapes of their shadows instead, and the lies they write upon the curtain.

xxxxx

_Why does your heart sound so different?_

_Which one?_

_You have more than—_

_I have two._

xxxxx

A low, slow aching in her chest. Her fingers still on his wrist in the silence. She didn’t know.

_I’m sorry._

_It’s still a good plan._ He shifts his hands, squeezes hers. _Have you chosen a story?_

She’d almost forgotten that compensation.

She keeps her eyes on the curtain, the shadows now still.

_How we would have met. If we hadn’t been—if things weren’t—if we had met in another time and place. Anywhere but here._

“Ah.” A rustle, settling down onto the mattress, letting his full weight rest there. “A tall order.” 

_So there I was in my laboratory, tackling some problem of immense scientific significance, when in walked a young lady with a stubborn cast to her chin and a smirk hiding in the corners of her mouth. Of course, I immediately suspected that she was someone other than whom she claimed to be—_

xxxxx

_Why does your heart sound so different?_

_Which one?_

_You have more than—_

_I have two._

_You have two hearts._

_Yes._

_Two hearts._

_…good heavens, Sparrowhawk, keep looking at me with that vivisectionist’s eye and I shall have to start keeping the scalpels under lock and key._

xxxxx

“Shall I stay?”

_They’ll be suspicious._

“Very well.” He hears the rustle as he sits, then the silence as he hesitates at the brink of the bed. “Miss Smith—Sarah—Sparrowhawk—”

She looks at him then.

“This whole experience can’t be—” It’s his turn to look away, look down. He rubs at the back of his neck. “Do you need—sometimes humans…Josie was rather fond of hugs.”

_I’m not Josie._

“Yes, well, quite,” he says. “Of course not. I only thought that since humans are—”

 _Pack animals?_ she challenges, raising an eyebrow.

He’s still not looking at her. His wrist twitches under her fingers. “Yes, ah. Perhaps not the, ah. Best phrasing.”

_Your lot aren’t? Pack animals, I mean?_

“Less a pack, more a hive. Lots of hexagonal structures and mindless droning.” He tries to smile.

_Do you miss them?_

Silence.

But she hears the answer.

It’s in the way he’s looking away from her. It’s in the hesitation she heard in his voice, the words stuttering forth in unconscious symmetry with the tapping of his right foot on that cold concrete floor. It’s in his hands, that only fisted the sheets and have not hurt her.

It’s in the beating of her solitary human heart: the answer. What she has to do. What she will do.

She sits up, and presses his large hand between her two small ones. Leans forward and presses her head into his shoulder.

_I’ll let you into my pack. Probationary status._

xxxxx

_Why does your heart sound so different?_

_Which one?_

_You have more than—_

_I have two._

_You have two hearts._

_Yes._

_Two hearts._

_…good heavens, Sparrowhawk, keep looking at me with that vivisectionist’s eye and I shall have to start keeping the scalpels under lock and key._

_And why aren’t your fingers healed?_

_My fingers? Oh that. It’s nothing._

_There’s only scars on your back. They healed fast. You heal faster than humans normally, don’t you?_

_It’s actually a rather fascinating property of the Gallifreyan clotting factor—_

_But where I bit you…_

_Ah. Well. It’s the enzymes. In human saliva. My body doesn’t quite know what to do with them. It takes some time._

_I’m sorry._

xxxxx

**Questions For the Doctor’s Second Visit**

**1\. Explain your circulatory system.**

**2\. Explain your nervous system.**

**3\. Physiologically speaking, how does your telepathy work?**

**4\. What other discrepancies are there between your species and humans?**

**5\. What are your people called?**

**6\. Where do they live?**

**7\. Why did you stop working on that machine in the corner? What is it?**

“I wish you’d given this to me ahead of time. I was never much good at pop quizzes.”

_If I gave it to you ahead of time, you’d only figure out better ways of not telling me anything._

“And how am I to fit in your story as well? And signing practice?”

_Choose one of them. Tell me a story about it. Any clarifications I need, I’ll ask for them in sign._

“An answer for everything as usual, Sparrowhawk.”

His hands begin to move, slow but still too fast to for her eyes to catch every phrase. He taught her some of these astronomical terms only yesterday for the satellite project with the communications array, gruff and cold for the camera:

**planet**

**constellation**

**K-A-S-T-E-B-O-R-O-U-S**

**G-A-L-L-I—**

xxxxx

She thought this would be harder, playing this for the camera. 

It is hard, but not in the way that she imagined.

That person she saw when she first opened her eyes in this cell—that blazing silhouette, that voice of ice and steel, those cold controlling hands that reached out to touch her scars as if her consent were nothing—is gone.

She cannot find him again, no matter how consistently the Doctor dresses in his costume.

And that is what makes it hard. Not fear of betrayal as they input compromised codes into the satellite’s computer banks, not panic at his constant presence, hovering over her like a play-pretend vulture, eyes filled with feigned hunger.

It is her own hunger that makes it hard. To talk to him somewhere where she does not have to worry about hiding her hands or lowering her eyes. To talk to him. To talk.

To ask _and what about, and then, but why, but how, no really, tell me, but then, and then, and then_

_And then and then and then but what about_

So she ignores the beginning pangs of a headache as she records the final (inaccurate) code in the official project notebook, and below it—her hand is only shaking a little—her pen draws a spiral.

Her fingers brush his as she passes it to him: _You owe me a story._

xxxxx

_Why does your heart sound so different?_

_Which one?_

_You have more than—_

_I have two._

_You have two hearts._

_Yes._

_Two hearts._

_…good heavens, Sparrowhawk, keep looking at me with those vivisectionist’s eyes and I shall have to start keeping the scalpels under lock and key._

_And why aren’t your fingers healed?_

_My fingers? Oh that. It’s nothing._

_There’s only scars on your back. They healed fast. You heal faster than humans normally, don’t you?_

_It’s actually a rather fascinating property of the Gallifreyan clotting factor—_

_But where I bit you…_

_Ah. Well. It’s the enzymes. In human saliva. My body doesn’t quite know what to do with them. It takes some time._

_I’m sorry._

_This is upsetting you. Perhaps we should just sit here—_

_No. No, keep talking. It doesn’t hurt so badly when you’re talking._

_How bad is it?_

_Next time, I think I’ll let you fix the bruises._

_That bad?_

_Yes. This pounding,_ stabbing _…yes._

 _Sparrowhawk—this time, would you let me—it would hurt less if you were asleep, I could help you sleep,_ just _sleep—_

_…only for a little bit? Would you promise, only for a little bit?_

_Of course, of course, shhh._

_I don’t want to sleep for months again._

_…what do you mean?_

_My fingers were broken before I came here, Doctor. The bones were in little pieces. I know how long it takes humans to heal._

_Sarah, I—_

_Just promise, Doctor. I’ll believe you if you just promise._

_I promise. Close your eyes. This will only be for a little while._


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I shameless ganked the gist of a Cory Doctorow blog post about the short story The Cold Equations for the Doctor’s rant in this chapter.

_She is watching the girl sleep. The spy. Of course she is a spy. Just because Josie wasn’t they expect her to swallow anything._

_Just because they beat the girl half to death—_

_The girl stirs. Her mouth falls open, a silent cry, her back arching up against the mattress—_

_She is at the side of the bed. She does not remember moving. Her hand is on the girl’s forehead. Humans burn so hot, and the girl is in the grips of a fever—_

_The spy. The spy. The spy._

__Sleep, _she tells her, and the girl’s mouth relaxes, shoulders soften, her body folding back down bonelessly onto the bed. A small body. So thin. A sketch in light pencil._

_She takes the girl’s pulse with her other hand. It is fast, but slowing. She will not need the medication this time._

_The girl is getting better._

_“I need more time,” she says out loud—why is a part of her surprised she can speak out loud?—“and this is no place for her to wake up to, in her condition”—but why does she care, if the girl is a spy, if she volunteered for this as Beth did—“a little more time”—but it’s already been—_

_She is still touching the girl’s forehead. She does not need to be touching the spy’s forehead. She takes her hand away._

_“A little more time. That’s all.”_

xxxxx

Of course the Doctor isn’t there when she wakes up. That would mean he might have to sit still as she asks him questions— _what was that dream? Me making up a reason, or you telling me something? An accident or on purpose?_ —and he wouldn’t have let that happen.

A flash of something like alarm, light and prickling—is he still there at all? Did they take him—

She hears him moving around the cell, and her heart _(whose heart? the girl or the--)_ starts again.

There’s a moment of dizziness as SJ sits up _(who is she, she was sitting next to the girl but down on the bed now so she is the girl isn’t she?)_ but that passes within seconds.

And the pain is gone. Her head—completely free, completely clear. For a little while last night, she thought it was never going to feel that way again.

SJ swings her legs over the edge of the mattress and pushes aside the curtain. The Doctor glances up, meets her eyes for a long second, measuring. Then he gives her a brisk nod and looks down again, sweeping together a large pile of mangled machine parts, metal filings, and sawdust.

It takes a moment to realize what is wrong with this picture.

The picture is missing an odd, canvas-covered pet project in the corner.

She springs up, walks to the corner. She can see his shoulders tensing out of the corner of her eye.

There is a perfect outline in the dust. But a perfect outline of what?

She checks that the bed-curtains are still blocking her from the camera, and raises an eyebrow at him.

The Doctor looks away.

SJ crosses the room to peer around him at the mess on the floor. Not that she could tell anything from this anyway—about the only components she recognizes are the electrodes—but the Doctor gives them a swift shove with the end of his broom, pushing them a foot away from her.

“You can check the clock if you like.” A short, hard sentence, his back to the camera. He punctuates it with another jab at the pile, looking at the metal pieces, not her. “I’d recommend checking the viral samples’ growth rates. They’d be considerably harder to tamper with than the clock.”

She risks a touch to the inside of his wrist (if the camera sees, surely it will look subservient, imploring?), and his head snaps up, eyes startled. 

She realizes that she doesn’t know what to say.

She looks down, instead, away from him, away from the clock. _What was this, anyway?_

He pulls away.

“A failed project,” the Doctor says gruffly. “No longer necessary. Redundant.” The bristles of the broom slip and scratch against the concrete floor. He seems to be trying to use the broom both to block the mess from her view and to punish it somehow, smash the shards into yet smaller pieces.

He flaps his hand towards her notebooks and the viral samples, and since she’s crossed into the camera’s view she has to flinch and quickly comply. She stabs the pencil downward into the paper, making nonsense marks as she taps out Morse code. **I have a right to know.**

He nods, but says nothing. She thinks, for several seconds, that he’s still not going to answer.

“In 1954, Astounding Magazine published a story called ‘The Cold Equations’ by Tom Godwin,” the Doctor says to the floor. “A girl stows aboard an Emergency Dispatch Ship to see her brother. She doesn’t realize that her added weight means there won’t be enough fuel to deliver the medical supplies the ship is carrying. She has to be jettisoned. No one’s fault. Only the cold equations.”

He takes another stab at the pile; the little pieces rattle as they hit the back of the dustpan. 

“You tell yourself a story. You tell yourself it’s an objective story. You didn’t write the laws of physics. You ignore that you wrote the fuel supply and the distance between the stars.”

SJ is staring very hard at the notes on the paper in front of her. She does not see them.

She sees a girl on a bed, sleeping.

“You tell yourself a story about your life. You tell yourself it’s an objective story. A moment of pain and fear and mistrust and hatred—that’s worth it, to prevent more pain, isn’t it? It wouldn’t really be hurting her if it stopped her hurting. You’ve been read so many stories that said pain was necessary, you forgot you didn’t have to write your story that way.”

 **You were going to use it on me.** Her hand is sweating; the pen is slippery in her hand. **This is what you used on Josie.**

“Different effect. Same cause.” He raises his eyes; she sees the motion in her peripheral vision. “I know you may not believe this, I know you won’t, but— I abandoned this plan weeks ago. When we first made our contract.”

**Then why are you only taking it apart now?**

A long silence. He looks away again.

“I was going to do it gradually,” he says at last. “Carefully. It was going to disappear piece by piece, and you would never have noticed, or asked me any inconvenient questions.”

**Then why didn’t you?**

“Because after last night, that would have been obscene.” He stops, shakes his head. “It would have always been obscene, but last night—when you—

“When Josie—when I—when we—we decided. With Josie, I asked her permission. I did ask her permission.”

SJ nods, very slowly.

“Godwin tried to save the girl,” the Doctor says. “He wrote three separate endings where the girl was ingeniously saved. The editor sent them all back. He was right, though perhaps for the wrong reasons. There are some ways in which the girl should not be saved.”

**What ways are those?**

It is the most important question. She stares very hard at the clock and the paper and the viral samples in front of her and notes that they have grown no more than would be expected in a single night, and still she cannot breathe and her heart cannot beat until he answers.

“The same ways in which Godwin killed her. The ways that would make her into a chess piece to be moved around without consultation.”

The words. A hand clenched around her heart, loosening.

She can breathe.

“I know it will be some time before you—trust me again.” His voice gruff. His hands clenched around the broom handle, the knuckles white. “But I think it is worth it—to tell you the truth. To begin this again, honestly.”

He is not human. His body looks human, stooped shoulders, scarred back, grey hair. Feet of clay. But he is alien, and that word is stardust in his eyes and mysteries in his bones and quick clotting factors in his blood, his mind layered in a singing wind-chime-whisper language she will never understand no matter how often she hears it in dreams. Choices and decisions splintering into fractals she cannot guess. Stories he may never tell, of the things he did when he fled the land of dragons in his boat of paper scraps and autumn leaves, to protect his hatchling and the humans he picked up along the way.

The guards and the Section Leader and the Brigade Leader and all the rest, they will never know how much they should fear him—fingertips that can brush against your brain, eyes that can send you into endless sleep. He could turn them all to his dolls and robots with a touch. He still would not escape—so many miles to the surface!—but he could take so many of his tormentors with him.

They should fear him, and that thin transparent film that is the only thing protecting them from his power: that he does not choose to use it as often as he could. 

He is choosing not to use it now.

He is choosing not to use it against her again.

He is not human.

It does not matter.

She can’t say all this in Morse.

**Come here.**

A twitch of his hand on the broom. “Why?”

She resists rolling her eyes. Trust him to choose this moment for some all-too-human stubbornness.

**Because I can’t hold your hand under the table if you’re all the way over there.**

Her alien almost drops his broom.

He crosses the room to her. He is so tall next to her. His hand is cold as it closes around hers. That is who he is, her alien. His human. This moment, can she say it—

_I trust you._

She cannot look at him or they may see. She has to pretend she cannot feel his hearts’ beat in his fingers or the cameras will catch it and it will all be lost.

_I want you to remember that._

She can hear him swallow.

_You sent me to sleep for months. You were planning to—I can’t stop being scared of you like turning off a switch. But you told me, and you say you’re not going to do it again, and that’s all I have, so—I trust you. And I need you to tell me something._

“Anything.” His voice is harsh, choked. Out loud. She squeezes his hand hard in reproof.

_I need to know about my dreams._

He nods, a slight blur at the corner of her eyes. _May I…come in?_

xxxxx

_She is standing above the bed. The Doctor is with her._

_They are looking down at the bed, where another Doctor is holding another SJ._

_“Where are we, really?” SJ says. Only a flickering ripple of oh-that’s-strange surprise that she can speak. Dreams._

_“Here,” the Doctor says from beside her. “Our bodies, on the other hand, are still standing at the counter.”_

_“And you don’t think that’ll look just a bit odd?”_

_A smile that she sees in her head, since she doesn’t turn her eyes. “Compressed time. One of the many benefits of a telepathic grammar.”_

_SJ looks down at the bed again. The Doctor and the SJ on it are asleep, the girl deeply, the alien more restless, his fingers twitching on her wrist. “What was that dream? Why would I—”_

_The standing Doctor’s fingertips brush her eyelids, icy cold. She jerks away._

_“Hush now,” he says. “This is only a metaphor.”_

_Blue light around the sleeping Doctor, pale as ice—blue light around the sleeping SJ, glowing softer but deeper like the eye of a flame, and the midnight blue light twists suddenly, sinks, stabs into the sleeping Doctor—_

_SOMANYTHINGsomanymanymanySOmANyTHtInGsthingsthingsthings—bluewhitelightfallingrushingcrashingin—there is the girl and she is the girl and she is watching the girl and she is the alien and she and the alien are watching the girl who is a memory in the alien and she is the she is the she is the—_

_She is crouched behind a hedge, tiny and startled away as the raging clumsy bull rips and tears—_

_She is crouched behind a wall, watching a beautiful salamander scamper off the edge—_

_She is crouched next to a bent and broken cage, hand outstretched almost as if she has forgotten it is there, as if she has forgotten the birdseed in her palm, as if the bird with its little head cocked—_

_She is the bull the salamander the bird the—_

_“Let’s choose just one set of symbols,” the Doctor says from beside her, the Doctor, and it is a wave crashing over her in relief, the Doctor, the Doctor is here, the Doctor is next to her, the Doctor is real and can be defined and his definition can anchor her down into one body and brain and memory if she just… “There is a limit to objective correlative.”_

_She is watching her dream again. She and the Doctor are watching her dream. In the dream there is a girl lying asleep on the cot. She looks like SJ but with injuries far worse than SJ has ever seen in the mirror. She is also translucent and flickering._

_In the dream there is a Doctor. He is also translucent, but glows pale blue._

_Another wave crashes over SJ, realization. “This was_ your _dream.”_

_And the midnight blue rippling through the world, knocking sections of the dream askew and slipping into the other light without a second’s hesitation, wavering back and forth, and the pale lights twists, alarmed, trying to take hold of the other light and ease it away, and the air is full of thoughts, thick and mixed and whose are they whose is she who is he they I—_

_She has moved. The dream has moved. She is standing in front of the countertop, her eyes trained down at its surface. She is standing in another time. She and the Doctor are standing in the Doctor’s body. They can feel her body several feet behind them on the bed. They cannot move._

_She can feel all the different layers of reality, like plastic wrap rubbing against her mind. There are the her and the Doctor whose bodies are standing at the counter in one time and whose minds are standing in the memory of the Doctor’s body in another time. There is the her behind her on the bed, and the dream that is a memory that is a prison of hurt and weight and on top of her and never-ending never never. And there is the memory of hearing that dream—his memory of her memory—ripping straight across the thirteen feet of space and stabbing into his (her?) brain without a second of skin contact—_

_She remembers waking up, and not being to—_

_\--move, he can’t move, he remembers the nightmare’s vise-grip on his mind and then gasping awake he felt her, she—_

_\--couldn’t move (sleep paralysis, old thing)—_

_\--please move, Sarah, what is this, it can’t, humans can’t—_

_\--a twitch and it all unlocks, oh thank God—_

_They can move._

_She can move, and she (remembers) hauls herself to a sitting position—_

_He can move, and he (they) remember/start away from the curtain, from the girl who should not be able to do these things, and there is a crash and a clatter of displaced equipment, a fluke, it’s only a fluke, of course it only because they hurt her so badly, cracked her mind right open…_

_And a slow cement-heavy certainty fills his chest, crushing him under the weight. Again. He has to do it again._

xxxxx

 _How many?_ she asks afterwards, when he has pulled her out. When the clock has ticked one, two, three seconds from the last second she saw before he took her under.

 _I dreamed of my home-world once,_ he says. _Do you remember?_

Men in high-collared robes, on pedestals. Voices like wind-chimes and circling stars.

_And once you took me to that room with the fire, and your friends._

A golden-haired girl in his arms.

 _Why didn’t you tell me?_ SJ demands. _Why didn’t you tell me I was hurting you, I would have—_ And she has to stop herself from squeezing too hard, from her nails biting into his palm. Because what would she have done? Different things at different times, and hurting him was not always a thing she would have avoided.

_Well, I was rather ferociously in denial for the first two. And it wasn’t so bad, really._

_Liar._

He squeezes her hand, gentler than she did his. _I would stand with you against every nightmare if I could._

xxxxx

That night:

_There is something hiding behind the Doctor’s face._

_She can hear its legs skittering._

_She can hear its legs skittering behind his eyes._

_“Don’t you trust me?” asks the Doctor. He is behind her. “I’ll save you.”_

_Thock, thock. Someone is knocking._

_“Don’t trust him,” says Sully. He is lying in the shower. Half of his head has been shot off. “You always trust the wrong person.”_

_“Shouldn’t have trusted me,” says Fitzoliver. There is a red line around his neck.“Should’ve known I couldn’t be counted on.”_

_Thock, thock._

_“Never should have trusted you,” Andy says. “I had my whole life ahead of me.”_

_“Hold still,” says the Doctor, and they are in the Room, and he is bending over her to press his lips against the cross-hatched scars on her throat, his lips are burning cold—_

_Thock, thock._

_“That’s quite enough of that,” says the other Doctor behind him, and the dream—a dream, she feels the relief like cool water rush through her, of course it’s a dream, begins to fold up and away…_

xxxxx

Thock, thock. Her eyes snap open. The Doctor’s hand against the headboard. The Doctor’s shadow on the curtain. Her heart is still pounding.

“Sarah Jane?”

SJ sits up, cross-legged, and pulls open the curtain.

His face is pensive as he looks down at her. He is keeping the muscles of his face deliberately tight and still. She takes his hand.

_You saw?_

“Bits and pieces. The stress level was high enough to obviate the need for skin contact, but not…” He looks away. “It's been higher. Somewhat.”

_Don’t be offended._

His thumb skates over her knuckles, and his lips twitch upward a fraction. “I’m sure this isn’t the first dream where the villain’s had my face,” he says. “I shall live, probably.”

She reaches up, tugs at his shirtsleeve until he sits down on the bed next to her. She presses her palms to his face, her little fingers framing the line of his jaw. Skin and muscle and bone beneath her fingertips, solid flesh that will not melt. 

_It’s happening less_ , she says. _It will stop, eventually. I don’t believe it anymore. Some parts of my brain just need to catch up, is all._

“I’m relieved to hear it,” he says.

 _I’m throwing you out of my pack just yet_. She lets her hands trail back down to his. Wonders if now is the right time to ask the question. _Could you teach me to not…broadcast, or whatever it is I do?_

He raises an eyebrow. “Something you don’t want me to see?”

She shoves him. _Actually, I wanted to avoid paralyzing you again, but if you’re going to be an ass about it…_

He considers. “I don’t know if humans can achieve that level of directionality.”

_So we have to keep tripping over each other’s nightmares?_

“Is it so bad?” he asks softly. “Now that we know, we could wake each other whenever we have one. We could build mental landscapes—I could show you worlds with effervescent seas circling sands soft as swan’s down, glaciers that gleam like diamonds in a noon that lasts an entire year, cities made of song—”

She puts her hand over his mouth. _Don’t—it sounds marvelous, Doctor, it truly does, but I can’t--_

 _We could talk_. He looks at her with those blue eyes. Shadowed eyes. Not moving her hand from his mouth. _Really talk. The way my people do. Since I left, I haven’t…she couldn’t. My grand-daughter. Talk the way—we do._

She moves her hand to cup his cheek. 

_I’m not saying never. Someday, I’d love to, but—I’m only human, and this is so much, and—for now, could you just teach me a way to wake up by myself? Please?_

“I suppose I could implant a subconscious suggestion—”

_By myself._

He sighs, then nods. “Very well. He swings his legs up onto the bed, and pulls the curtain closed. “We’ll take the long way ‘round. You’re lucky I spent so many years in a Tibetan monastery or I'd not have the faintest idea how to adapt this to your physiology.” He taps the mattress next to him. “Come on then. We’ll start with some simple breathing exercises.”


	11. Chapter 11

Breathe in, breathe out.

Her mind is a still, calm pool.

Her mind is a still, calm pool.

A wind whips up—no. No. Her mind is—

Damn.

 _It will take time._ His voice like a light breeze, a breath of cool air across her mind. His fingertips make small circles at her temples. _Relax. Concentrate on the mental image._

Her mind is a still, calm pool.

xxxxx

Their nights take on a pattern. It is strange, and a miracle, and completely mundane.

She will leave the invitation in his notes. Sometimes he sees her leave it, other times she goes to bed and lies there waiting for him to see it, feeling the stillness of the cold air around her, the warp and weft of the rough cotton beneath her. The seconds tick by and she marks each one, feels each one, feels everything.

Then footsteps, and a knock against the bedpost. Still hesitant after all this time, still willing to be turned away.

It makes it so much easier to sit up, to pull aside the curtain and let him in.

He tucks the blanket over her, fastidious. They put on their shadow play. Lately, he’s taken to humming songs under his breath to time himself—silly nonsense things, skipping rope rhymes and such. She suspects he really does it only to make her smile. 

After, he lies down on top of the covers next to her, and tells her a story. 

_Once upon a time, there was a mountain, and at the top of the mountain lived a hermit who was known far and wide for his wisdom, and at the bottom of the mountain lived a frightened child…_

_Once upon a time, there was a proud race of warrior women, cruel and beautiful, and a planet they would call their own or destroy…_

_Once upon a time, there was a young Scottish piper, who stumbled onto the lair of a dragon…_

Sometimes, when the story is ended, they will do practice signing, or do the mental exercises. She is improving. She is learning to read the map of her mind from the inside.

But sometimes, she cannot. Sometimes it is already so much having him next to her in the bed, even not touching, even not doing anything. So she reaches over to the box under the bed and hands him a book, and gets a book for herself, and he reads and she reads. In silence, until he decides to abandon his own book and read over her shoulder, which inevitably leads to a running commentary on the action—“well, it can’t have been her if she’s murdered now, so that only leaves the vicar”—or his own bizarre form of literary criticism—“I told Tolstoy not to put that bit in, you’ve got to give the reader some relief, I said”—until she glares at him and he goes back to his own read, pretending contrition.

She falls asleep reading, usually. Sometimes the nightmares still come, even if he’s there. She makes herself wake up. She holds onto him until she can stop shaking. When she can’t stop shaking she asks permission to go inside, and he consents, and she goes to the little room he’s made for her inside his mind, green grass and blue sky and a tree with cool shade, and it’s quiet there, and safe, and he stretches time so that she can stay as long as she needs.

xxxxx

Morning. SJ yawns, stretches. Counts to fifteen slowly as she sits up, savoring these few moments of privacy before she puts on her face and continues the show. Her hand on the curtain—

And then the sound of the door, and the sharp click-click-click of the Section Leader’s heels.

SJ is up and out of the bed before she can even think of how strange this reaction is, how different than it would have been even a few weeks ago. And now that thought is only half an echo, barely heard behind the immediate imperative: _get to the Doctor. Protect the Doctor._

He could protect himself against the Section Leader, but SJ already knows—but she doesn’t know _why_ —he won’t. 

Their gazes swing towards her simultaneously, the Doctor and the Section Leader. It is not the weight it once would have been. 

It is not comfortable either.

The floor is ice against her bare feet as she comes to stand at the Doctor’s elbow. His left hand reaches out, comes to rest lightly on her arm. Acceptable risk.

The Section Leader’s eyes track the movement of his arm, and they narrow, cold and focused. SJ’s stomach is a tight hard pit. She can feel her pulse in the bottom of her feet, fire against ice.

Where are the soldiers? Shaw always comes with soldiers.

“I think you know what this is about,” Shaw says to the Doctor, as if SJ isn’t there. She is dangling a set of handcuffs from her elegant black-gloved fingers.

The Doctor shrugs, a casual gesture so carefully choreographed that it is anything but. “Really, I thought you’d be here earlier. Your masters must really be keeping you jumping for you to have put off such a golden opportunity for needless brutality.” 

“Needless? I should hardly think so.” The Section Leader smiles; there is no humor in it. “Creative, on the other hand…”

There is just the slightest bob of the Doctor’s adam’s apple. It is the only sign. He does not remove his fingers from SJ’s arm, does not even vary the pressure. She feels gratitude in every inch of her that he does not move; sudden movements make tigers attack.

The Doctor inclines his head towards the cuffs. “I take it those are for me?”

The Section Leader’s smile widens just slightly, one incisor exposed like a fang. “Hardly. I’ve always taken your cooperation for granted.”

That sally lands harder; the Doctor’s fingers twitch. He clears his throat. “Then why bring them down? Your theatre of cruelty always struck me as rather minimalist with regard to props.”

The Section Leader lets her hand fall against the bars of the cell, leans forward. “For your new friend, of course.”

Faster than the light the Doctor’s hand is clamped around SJ’s wrist, her mouth falls open instinctively before she remembers she cannot cry out. _“You will not touch her.”_

“Fasten them yourself, by all means,” the Section Leader says, examining the fingernails of her other hand in a show of boredom, a note of acid creeping into her voice. “I’m sure you’ll manage even that with your sanctimony intact; nothing else seems to have dented it.”

“Miss Smith is not going anywhere.” 

SJ can feel her bones where his hand is gripping her.

Section Leader Shaw raises an eyebrow. “Did I say anything about going anywhere?” The note of acid in her voice has become an entire symphony. “It seems I overestimated your ability to grasp the situation. I don’t know why I’m surprised.”

“Explain it to me in small words, then,” the Doctor says between gritted teeth.

The Section Leader sighs as if she is a put-upon schoolteacher only going over material out of the kindness of her heart. As if she has all the time in the world, and merely resents the Doctor for drawing things out. But SJ sees the way her eyes flicker towards the clock on the wall, the too-quick blink and the momentary freezing of that icicles and sleet smile.

There’s a deadline on this conversation.

“Predators attack in response to movement,” she says, a lecturer expounding on a subject below her qualifications. “They attack it quite quickly and ferociously, to satisfy their appetites, and when they have had their fill, they leave. _And they don’t attack a gazelle they can’t see.”_ She waits a moment, and then hisses through her teeth and stamps her foot. She swings around thirty degrees, an odd angle until SJ realizes that now no one watching the camera will be able to read her lips. “He’s coming, you idiot, and he’s not in a mood to respect the letter of the law, so if you care one tenth of what you pretend for your little play-toy, you will get her out of sight and _make sure she stays there.”_

The Doctor’s hand jerks; SJ stumbles as she is pulled back behind him.

“The Brigade Leader,” he says hoarsely. “You involved the Brigade Leader.”

“I’m not the bloody one who sent him on a goose chase after Admiral Jackson that nearly cut off our supply lines!” the Section Leader snaps. “I might have been able to protect you from even that, but no, you had to try to implicate me in the entire affair!”

“You drugged Sarah,” the Doctor says. His voice hard. “There had to be consequences.”

“Well, now you’ve got consequences,” the Section Leader says through a smile that looks like it’s making her sick, one hand gripping the bar in front of her so hard it trembles. The skin is discolored around her wrists, just peeking out from under the uniform sleeves—bruises? “Going after me would have been business as usual, but you shouldn’t have alluded to the Duchess. I’m surprised he didn’t have a heart attack, the way he’s been on edge—or found a way to give you one. You know he’s only looking for an excuse. And he’s currently taken a rather Biblical turn of mind, ‘an eye for an eye’—”

The Doctor snorts, but SJ can feel his pulse in his fingers, beating double time. “And how does he expect me to get any work done like that?”

“That was the bit of logic that finally penetrated his brain, yes,” Shaw says through gritted teeth. “So now he’s tentatively committed to not doing _you_ any lasting damage. At the moment he’s so furious I’m not quite sure he even remembers she’s here, but one look at her and I’m sure he’ll recall quite quickly how attached you get to your little pets. Remind me, how many future technologies does she have in her brain, behind that fragile little skull? And how many in yours? Even the Brigade Leader can do the maths.”

The Doctor takes a step towards the bars, almost involuntarily. SJ recoils. He can’t be thinking of—he wouldn’t let the Section Leader—he can’t seriously be thinking—

His hand covers the Section Leader’s on the iron bar. “You’re warning me.”

A humorless, strangled laugh. “Perceptive.”

“Why?”

She glares up at him. “You know why.”

“I do,” he says, and his hand leaves her, reaches out to brush against and cup her cheek. 

She stiffens but does not pull away. “That is _not_ the reason.”

SJ is trapped, SJ is pulling away but she cannot, she is pulling away but the Doctor’s hand does not loosen and he does not even look at her, SJ is screaming silently through her skin but the Doctor is a sheer smooth wall in front of her, impenetrable.

“I once knew a woman named Beth Shaw,” the Doctor says softly. “She had a brilliant mind, and a will of granite, and a heart like molten steel. And neither of us realized that she was dying a bit more with every day.”

Shaw arches an eyebrow. “Are you telling me you’ve been putting arsenic in my coffee?”

Her voice is more breathless than it has any right to be.

“As if you’d let me anywhere near your coffee.”

“Trying to sow dissent against the Brigade Leader then? You’d think after all these years, you’d learn.”

“You’d think,” he agrees. “He is, however, not the culprit.”

“Then who?”

A sigh like it hurts to leave his chest, like it is the last piece of hope leaving his body. “Beth Shaw, of course. To make room for the Section Leader.”

Shaw jerks back as though she has been struck.

The Doctor’s hand is still hanging in the air. His voice is soft, so soft, the whisper of cajoling a wild animal closer.

“She’s not real, Beth. You’re killing yourself for a recruitment poster you saw when you were seven.”

For a second, SJ thinks the Section Leader is frozen, will not respond.

Then her face rips open in a snarl. 

“Oh, I’ll show you just how real she is, Doctor. The State may need you alive and in something close to one piece, but I fully intend to extract my pound of flesh.” Her hand snakes out in a slap, fingernails scoring red lines down the Doctor’s face. “The Beth you knew was a lie.” She grins—no, she bares her teeth. “Do not mistake my pragmatism for mercy.”

xxxxx

The Doctor doesn’t look SJ in the eye as he handcuffs her to the bed.

The blood is pounding in her ears. She wants to struggle, she can’t struggle, she has to keep reminding herself that—the Section Leader is watching, and what good would it do, what could she prevent, but she should try, but it will only make things worse, but she is only being a coward—

 _Look at me, Doctor,_ she sends. _If you’re going to take this decision anyway from me, at least have the decency to do it while looking me in the eye._

His fingers fumble slightly as he lines the cuffs with bandages to keep the metal from cutting into her skin. But he doesn’t look at her.

_I know you can hear me, don’t pretend you can’t. Don’t do this, please don’t do this, I can do anything except this, you don’t have to do this alone!_

“Stop fussing,” the Section Leader says. Her voice with an edge you could cut granite on. “You’re delaying the inevitable. He’ll be here any second.”

“Try to contain your anticipation,” the Doctor says coldly. But he stands. His fingers leave SJ’s skin, a single thought skittering from them before losing contact: _Be still. Be very, very still._

_Doctor!_

But he cannot hear her now.

Impatient, the Section Leader grabs him by his collar, pitching him forward. SJ hears his knees hit the floor, starts upward towards him before the cold grip of the iron yanks her back with a clatter. The sound snaps Section Leader Shaw’s eyes back to SJ, back to the drop of blood marking a winding path down her arm from where the rough edge of the cuff bit in, the Doctor’s bandages not entirely effective. The Section Leader stares at the drop of blood as if contains vital, intricate information that she must memorize. Then she jerks her gaze to the side to meet SJ’s eyes, gives her a curt nod. 

There is a look in her face like…contempt? Recognition? Hunger?

Yes, yes, and yes.

“I’ll be back for you.”

And the curtain falls back into place, blocking everything from view.

xxxxx

The Doctor is trying not to make a sound. She can tell from the sounds that he is making, the muffled through-the-teeth whimpers and strangled-in-the-throat screams. Only the sounds and the shouting of the interrogation and the shadows across the curtain and the Brigade Leader’s voice over and over again, those genteel vowels stretched into howls of feral rage as he brings the whip down again and what if he kills him, what if he hurts the Doctor so badly he can’t be fixed, if he loses control, if the Section Leader can’t stop him—SJ doesn’t want to see and she can’t let herself be seen but she can’t make herself remember that, each time the sounds come her arms jerk and strains at the cuffs, her back arching up off the bed, the metal cutting into her skin and the linen bandages rubbing it raw. She forgets she can’t scream, every sound snapping her mouth wide open in a silent echo, and she tries to bite down on her arm to muffle the sound that will never come out, her breathing so harsh and ragged surely the Doctor will hear it, the Brigade Leader will hear it, she will be lost, she will be dead. She presses the tears back down, can’t let the Section Leader see when she comes, she is supposed to hate and fear and protect the Doctor all at the same time and in a way that tears do not reckon into so she cannot let the Section Leader see but the tears keep coming, the Section Leader is coming soon, SJ needs to have a plan.

A lull. Not quite silence. Feet moving away.

Is it…over?

And then, almost in punishment for the thought, the sound of a whip, the brutal thwack of flesh against concrete—the Doctor’s body hitting the ground—and the sound of—

The sound of a zip being undone.

“Enjoying your little radio play?”

SJ jumps as Section Leader Shaw slips past the curtain, the fabric barely rippling as she slides past the thin fabric with the grace of a cat. She swings her legs over the side of the bed, her face impassive.

SJ is frozen.

Shaw raises an eyebrow. “I asked a question.”

There’s no point in lying; the answer has to be written all over her face. SJ gives a quick, short shake of her head.

The Section Leader’s lips twist in a parody of a smile. “I expected nothing less.” She shakes her head. “You and your kind always think you’re the exception to everything, but you’re still a woman. In the end, you succumb. To the promises, to the sweet words, to your natural place in the order of things.” Her tone manages to be triumphant and disappointed at the same time, all with a vicious edge creeping in. “He knows all about that, the Doctor does. He puts ideas in your pretty little head, twists his words all around to trap you in logic puzzles, talks you into compromises and sacrifices for his own selfish sake until you believe he’s the one doing you a favor. He asks for things you cannot give, and you start to think that after all, maybe you can.” Shaw pulls out a cigarette and lights it. Her tone grows calmer. “This is, as I said, completely natural.” She shifts on the bed, closer to SJ, her arm extending languorously until the red-hot tip of the cigarette is smoldering only inches from SJ’s lips. “It would rather be a shame, though, if you allowed it to interfere with our…understanding.”

Outside the bed, a groan from the Doctor provides an illustration of her point.

SJ swallows, hard. She can take another burn. She can. She took plenty before.

 **What do you want?** she starts to sign, before she remembers that she is chained, before she can remember that he Section Leader cannot sign.

“An assurance of your loyalty,” Shaw answers, and SJ’s heart stops. She understood the hand gestures, she has understood anything the camera has managed to capture for the past— “Or, failing that admittedly optimistic goal, an assurance of your instincts for self preservation.”

Signing: **I’ll do anything—**

“If you’re going to lie, start small,” Shaw says. “As a sign of respect, if nothing else.” 

The cigarette tip burns bright, bright red, hovering in the air. It is everything that SJ can see. It is stealing all the air from her lungs. She can still hear the Doctor, the muffled thump of flesh, the labored cries, each more ragged than the last—

She can take another burn. It’s not as though she hasn’t got them before.

But her face, if the Section Leader gets angry, if she goes for her eyes next—

“Do you love him?” the Section Leader asks conversationally.

SJ starts, shakes her head rapidly. 

“Good,” Section Leader Shaw says. She stubs the cigarette out on the edge of SJ’s cuff; SJ tries not to flinch, fails. Shaw goes on as if she hasn’t noticed: “The daft little blonde one did, you know. Not that it did her any good in the end, oh, he washed his hands of her quite quickly once she lost her novelty value. And since she was utterly useless for my own purposes, there was no point in my extending protection.” Her fingers trail around the edge of the cuff, not quite touching SJ’s skin. “I do hope you will remain useful.”

SJ’s fingernails are cutting into her skin. The Section Leader’s eyes are all she sees; her voice and the cries of the Doctor are all she hears.

“I take it you have something for me?” the Section Leader asks.

SJ jerks her head towards the foot of the bed.

Shaw pulls back just enough to reach beneath the mattress, her fingers finding the folder with SJ’s carefully fabricated notations on the Doctor’s health, mood, and state of mind.

“Do you expect me to believe he hasn’t found this yet?” the Section Leader asks casually, not looking up as she flips the folder open, skims its contents. “Do try harder.”

SJ shakes her head, starts to sign then switches to a fist against the headboard, Morse code, **he never said anything—**

 _“Shut up!_ ” The Section Leader is across the mattress in a pounce, her hand clamped around the metal of the cuff and pulling it from the headboard; SJ can smell her perfume, floral, faintly acrid. “You are holding still, you are being quiet, you are being a gazelle that does not get disemboweled by the pride of lions today, have you _nothing_ resembling memory?”

SJ swallows, pulling as far back as she can—they can’t touch, matter and antimatter, all the rules are gone if they touch.

The Section Leader’s grip stays firm on the cuff, but with a perceptible effort, she slides her impassive mask once more over her features. “Regardless of whether he’s seen anything, this location is far too obvious; you might as well plant a flag saying’ Covert Operation Here.’ Scatter your reports in your regular notes, since you’re ciphering those as well. Or leave it in English and hide it in the middle of a dreary recollection of boarding school, I don’t care. Just don’t leave coded communications under your mattress like an amateur.” She spits the last word.

SJ nods, but the Section Leader isn’t looking, too busy skimming through the folder—if that’s the rate at which she reads ciphers, no wonder the newsrunners were kept busy coming up with a new one every three weeks. 

“Nothing I didn’t already know,” she concludes, slotting them back into the folder with a sound like a guillotine falling in place. She slides them deftly back under the mattress. “Get rid of those. Preferably without arousing his suspicion, if you’re capable. Don’t hesitate to leave a note with the tea things if you’ve got something I can actually use. Only—do be sure it is actually useful. I would hate to have to revise my assessment of your capabilities.”

SJ nods, once. In the unseen cell beyond, the Brigade Leader laughs. The Doctor whimpers.

“Do you know what I enjoy most about these little chats?” the Section Leader asks, just as she turns to go. Her tone musing, contemplative. “The opportunity to prove him wrong.”

xxxxx

The silence is worse.

After the Brigade Leader and the Section Leader leave, there is silence for so long.

SJ holds still in the bed, so still, her uniform not even rasping against the rough cotton of the sheets, she barely dares to breathe, she tries not to hear the hammering of her heart—

Until finally, finally, finally—

The slightly wet, strained hiss of air, in and out.

The Doctor, breathing through the pain.

She breaks silence then, raps Morse code entreaties **please Doctor are you all right Doctor can you move do you need me please** until her hands are shaking too hard and the words dissolve into a sea of dots and dashes and the tears come, spilling forth hot and relentless until her vision blurs, stupid foolish girl to cry now when it’s all over. Nearly over. The worst part, at least, surely.

Another wet sound, the Doctor’s palm slapping down on the floor. Creaking, shuffling, as he hauls himself to his feet. She can’t see through the curtain and still she sees it exactly, exactly in her mind.

Hesitant steps, then he is at the curtain, pulling it back—the rings screech slowly across the bar, his movements jerky.

His face is covered in blood like a port wine stain.

“You should—see the other fellow,” he says with an attempt at a ghoulish smile. It’s ruined when he nearly pitches forward.

 _I would have taken this for you,_ SJ thinks desperately at him as his hands close over hers, her heart an open wound, opening further as his hands come to the cuffs, unlock them. They fall, the metal ringing against the floor like an alarm bell. _I would have—_

“I don’t expect you to forgive me,” he says gruffly.

And then he loses consciousness, and topples face-forward onto the bed.

xxxxx

He comes to again soon enough that SJ doesn’t have to drag him to the shower, doesn’t have to worry nearly as much about dropping him, about the pressure on his wounds, the impact on the long stripes across his back.

There are so many stripes.

SJ can hide her face against the Doctor’s side as she supports half his weight, cheek against his blood-stained shirt as they do a careful shuffling two-step across the floor, but she cannot stop the hitch in her breathing, the ragged gasping gulp of it. Unfair that losing her voice should leave it still impossible to hide crying.

Unfair that all her friends keep dying, all because of her.

The Doctor stumbles into the shower, manages to steady himself against the back wall as she enters. His hands find her shoulders and they sit down together, the Doctor’s eyes squeezing shut as if he can shut out the pain along with sight.

There is blood on SJ’s hands now, and on her face.

“It’s not so bad,” says the Doctor, his eyes still shut. “The Brigade Leader merely had to assert his dominance. Typical in many pack animals, such as bureaucrats.”

Still trying to make it a joke. Still trying to reassure her. She wants to hold him close but there is nowhere she could touch that would not hurt him. A sob should be silent, but it makes a choking cough in her throat instead. 

She twists the water on instead of touching him, the cold spray like a slap.

At least the sound of it will cover the pitiful sound of her tears on her cheeks, that ghost of human grief.

“It’s all right.” His hand finding hers, his voice soothing as he twists his head up to look at her, his eyes open now, and worried through the pain. “It’s only a body.” He smiles, and she can see now how he could have been that dragon with a hatchling; she can see how he could have been a father, a grandfather even. His voice is gentle, counterpoint to the hiss of the water as it turns red with his blood and slips away down the drain. “You can’t get attached to a body. You can’t live forever in a body, can’t trust them. Poor little humans, you only get the one. Nowhere else to go.”

He’s babbling now. She finds the soap. _Can you manage this on your own?_

“Largely, I imagine. But—ah— ” He tries to raise his arms, winces as they get to shoulder level. “I may, just possibly, need some help with the clothes.”

 _Nothing I haven’t seen before_. She eases his shirt and trousers off as best she can. Her own are getting soaked; she’ll have to wear a towel or bedsheet later while they dry. Her hands shake a little, but it really is mostly with the cold of the water. She’s fine. The Doctor’s going to be fine. This isn’t the worst thing that has ever happened to either of them.

True to his word, the Doctor manages the soap and the washcloth well enough to take care of most of the ablutions while SJ splits her time between looking away in an attempt to protect his dignity and watching him like a hawk, certain that in the second she has glanced away he has fallen unconscious, slipped, cracked his head open, started to drown…

She takes the washcloth from him when it becomes apparent that he can’t reach his back, eases him away from the wall so she can help. He only gives a half-hearted murmur of protest, and then that slight hiss when she has to touch his wounds. Some of them have clotted and opened again under the water. She goes as gently as she can. _Sorry. I’m almost done._

_It’s quite all right. Take your time. Wouldn’t want an infection, after all._

There’s mostly just bruising on his scalp, but the one laceration has bled quite heavily, and she has to knead slowly and carefully with her fingers to wash the blood out of his hair, running her fingers through his locks to keep them from getting tangled again.

 _Thank you,_ he says. _I’m just a bit vain over the hair on this body._

 _Just a bit?_ she asks. She tries to make it tart, tries to send the suggestion of a cheeky smile.

The smile she doesn’t quite manage manifests itself on his face instead. _Just a bit,_ he agrees.

And the water runs red down the drain.

xxxxx

SJ gets the Doctor into bed, hangs up his wet clothes. Changes out of her own wet uniform into the towel and grabs one of his first-aid kits before returning to him. The stripes from the whip still stand out red and angry on his back, weeping blood and clear fluid.

She touches his shoulder hesitantly. _I don’t know what half this stuff is. This salve here, will that work on you?_

“Let me see the ingredients.” He twists his head back at her, squints at the label. “Should help somewhat. Won’t hurt.”

_Roll over onto your stomach, then._

“People seem to be asking that quite a bit today,” he says dryly.

Her hands falter. That he can say that—that he can joke—

She wants to say the words ‘I’m sorry’ but they are already dead in her throat, and they die in her hands too. She sits on the edge of the bed next to him and tries to say it in the way she applies the salve instead, warming it with her palms first and spreading it gently across his skin. 

For a second she thinks that his skin warming under her hands is only from her touch, and then she realizes.

 _Don’t,_ she says. Her eyes have closed, the tears hot and brimming beneath her eyelashes. Her breath caged in her throat. _Don’t use up your energy just to keep my hands warm._

“You’ll catch your death,” he murmurs, but the temperature dips from radiator to slightly below human normal. Still too high for him, but he’s stubborn. She can let him keep this little piece of his pride.

There is a line of cigarette burns that starts at the Doctor’s right shoulder blade and curls upward towards his temple. SJ begins working her way upward.

He flinches.

SJ jerks her hands back.

His shoulders are still tense.

She reaches, tentatively, for his hand. Stops. Brings her fingers to the sheet by the side of his head, taps against the fabric:

**Did I hurt you?**

“No. Not hurt, precisely, only—no.” He sighs, a gust of air expelled as if in irritation at himself. “Neck—a bit sensitive. My people. Lots of nerve endings. More than humans.”

It takes a second before she grasps the full import of what he is saying, and then she thinks she will never be able to touch him again, she will never understand how he has been able to let her touch him.

 **You must hate us all sometimes,** she says. **Humans, I mean.**

He twists his head up to look at her, his face genuinely shocked. “Not at all.” He takes her hand, his fingers interlaced with hers. His eyes are earnest. “It’s a bad century. It will pass. Half a dozen generations from now, it will all be like a dim nightmare in the world’s memory.”

 _A bad century?_ SJ asks. _How old are you?_

A smile, relieved almost. There they are, sliding back into their old roles, interviewer and reluctant subject. “I’m in the prime of my life, I’ll have you know! I’m just very well-traveled.”

It’s tempting to pursue this new bit of information, but she knows he made it that way on purpose, a red herring. She sticks to her original course. _Will you be there, after those six generations?_

Shadows in his eyes; she almost wishes she hadn’t asked. But he doesn’t pull away.

 _Quite possibly_ , he admits.

_Hard to kill?_

_Fairly easy._ He gives a self-deprecating grin. _Difficult to make it stick._

She snorts through her nose.

And a real smile breaks across his face, the difference between it and all his previous attempts like comparing gold and pyrite. “You can laugh!” he says, delighted. 

She shrugs, suddenly, oddly embarrassed. _Don’t twist the conversation back around to me._

“It’s good to hear you laugh,” he says. Still smiling, but his eyes are serious.

She can’t look at him when he looks at her like that. She looks down at their hands instead.

 _I’m glad_ , she says, because she has to. _That you’ll be here. It’s selfish, but I’m—it’s just that—when I first woke up, I thought being with you for the rest of my life was the second worst thing that could ever happen to me—_

“Only the second-worst? I’m flattered.”

She dares a gentle swat at an unbruised patch of skin. _Don’t! You know what I’m trying—what I want to say. That was what I felt then. And now, knowing you’ll be here—that you’ll be here, with me, as long as I’m here…it’s comforting. Even if nothing changes._

“It will change,” he insists.

_Maybe. In half a dozen generations. I won’t be here to see you proved right or wrong._

There is something caught in his throat as he responds. “I know.”

SJ pretends not to hear the sandpaper scrape of his premature grief, finishes rubbing the salve into his back. Changes the subject. _The Section Leader’s probably expecting you to ‘assert yourself’ after this. How long do you think we should give for that, ten minutes?_  
“You wound me.”

 _Five, then._ She hesitates, then goes on. _I can leave you alone after, if you’d like._

“You could stay.” He clears his throat. “If you didn’t mind.”

She looks away so he won’t see her relief. _Not at all._

xxxxx

The shadow play is even briefer than five minutes, because SJ cannot stop the tears from coming to her eyes when the Doctor winces in pain, and the Doctor cannot make himself continue once SJ is crying. They lie side by side instead, the tips of their fingers just touching.

 _What did you do?_ she asks finally. _After she drugged me._

“What I had to, to keep her away from you,” he says. “I do not for one instant regret it.”

 _You made a choice for me without my permission_ , she says. It hurts to say it, but she has to. _You promised you were going to try to stop doing that._

“I did,” he agrees, his voice heavy. He does not add anything more.

_Then the least you can do is tell me how you did it._

He sighs, but does not argue. “You may not have heard of the Duchess—”

 _Newsrunner,_ she reminds him with a poke.

“She was the Section Leader’s—sponsor—before Lethbridge-Stewart. Because of course there’s nothing queer about it when you can fit it into a nice little hierarchical structure with a side order of humiliation—” He cuts himself off. “After the Duchess’ fall from favor, Shaw probably would have been arrested on suspicion of aiding and abetting her escape, if the Brigade Leader hadn’t taken her under his wing. It remains a sore point in their relationship.”

_And that bit about Admiral Jackson?_

“Ah, good old Ben. Quite difficult to predict that man. I wouldn’t put it past him to really have been harboring the Duchess all this time, for any number of reasons.”

_So you sent something to Shaw that made the Brigade Leader think she might be disloyal?_

He grins faintly, shades of a mischievous boy with his hand in the cookie jar. “And tied up quite a few government resources in red herrings and dead ends, I might add.”

_How did you know it would work?_

That wipes the smile off his face. “Because they love each other. And so they hate each other in equal measure. Because that is what humanity has made love in this century—a weakness, a deviance, a perversity. So demonized that the only way its expression can be rationalized is through violence and control.”

SJ is a little thrown by the fervor of his response. _Did she do that to his eye, then?_

“No. That was me.”

SJ starts, twisting her head up to gaze at him in shock.

The Doctor shrugs. “He hurt Beth.” 

As if those words are the only explanation necessary.

 _Back when she was your assistant?_ SJ asks. Because that could make sense, that he would be protective of her back then, when he didn’t know she was a monster. _Back when you thought she was just a prisoner?_

“After.” 

A confession in one word.

A pause, then: “She was the first face I saw, when I woke up. She was my friend, and my confidante, and my lover. She was—I thought she was my only ally, and it—is not always easy to forget what she…was. Then.”

There is too much forgiveness in his heart, SJ thinks. He was not made for this world, where there is only punishment and resistance. He is like Sully that way, always believing the best of people. Always giving the benefit of the doubt, until he drowned in it.

 _She tortures women,_ SJ says. _She seeks them out on purpose. She told me all about how she likes to take us apart._

This is what she says, and it is cruel, because she needs to make him understand that she is not like him. That she cannot turn the other cheek so readily. That he can forgive her or not, but she will never forgive Beth Shaw. 

“She is not…the most self-aware woman,” he says carefully. “I believe she has worked very hard to be as unaware of herself as possible.”

 _She’s a monster,_ SJ insists.

He sighs, closes his eyes. “I know.”

After a few minutes, SJ interlaces her fingers with him and squeezes tight.

Because he may or may not deserve it, and she may or may not be capable of it—

But she still wants to give him forgiveness.

xxxxx

_“You shouldn’t be here,” the Doctor says, leaning against a strange round countertop with a rising and falling column. “Not unless you make a deliberate effort. You need to be practicing restraint, or we’ll never get you out of my dreams.”_

_“I had more questions,” SJ says, marveling at the ease with which she speaks in dreams, that she ever took this miracle of moving lips and tongue for granted. “What did you mean, about being easy to kill or hard to make it stick?”_

_“Precisely what I said,” the Doctor answers. He walks to the door and holds it open for her. Beyond, there is the cell. “Bodies are unreliable things. You have to trade them in occasionally.”_

_SJ was just at the door, but now she is directly in front of the Doctor, reaching out to touch the side of his face. Memories that aren’t hers are in her mind, flashes of faces that used to belong to her—no, to him. Her? Them? Unconfined to a single shape, a single skin, a single gender. Who he is, who he has been, will be. Possibilities so vast they make infinity look microscopic…_

_She gazes in wonder up at his face, at her hand on his skin. So many mysteries hidden under his skin, so much knowledge—_

_And then she is tied down to a table and Beth is leaning over him (her?) and the scalpel is coming down like a paintbrush spreading a long line of crimson paint and she is smirking, “Really, Doctor, for all your talk of pursuing scientific advancement—”_

SJ jolts awake. The Doctor’s body is tense against hers, his eyes wary as he looks down at her. A rabbit poised to flee from a predator.

She presses her forehead into an unbruised spot on his arm, baring her neck. See? See, she is vulnerable. She will not hurt him. 

_I’m not her_ , she sends. _I won’t hurt you._

xxxxx

There is another dream.

_She is back in The Room._

_Down, down, down being held down in The Room and there is no memory of how she got there, memory is lie, she tried to lie when they started cutting into her but then the pain like a bursting sun and she told the truth and it spilled out of her but they didn’t stop, they never stopped, she can’t remember what was the truth anymore, only that she used to think it was so important but nothing is important now because nothing exists except the screaming and the pain and that is all that will ever exist, the pain and the weight and her legs wrenched apart and the knife in her abdomen—_

“Sarah.” Blue eyes, impossibly large blue eyes above her. “Sarah, wake up.”

She lashes out, but her hand is caught, and she thrashes, helpless.

“Sarah, it’s me.”

Me. Him. The Doctor.

SJ nods, short, sharp. Tries to breathe. Tries to slow her heart.

“It was just a nightmare.”

Just a nightmare. Just a phase. Only a few more regenerations and it will be like a bad dream. She and her pain are so small in the scheme of things, are nothing, nothing at all.

They cut something out of her in the dream—

She pulls away from him, curls up on her side, clutching her stomach.

He touches her wrist. _Sarah?_

 _Was I pregnant?_ she asks abruptly. 

“What?” He almost lets go, he is so startled.

 _It could have happened,_ SJ says, staring firmly at the curtain in front of her. She isn’t going to cry. The curtain doesn’t seem real. Her arms tight around her stomach don’t feel real. _They raped me almost every day. They didn’t use anything to stop it from happening. There are weeks where everything blurs together and I wouldn’t remember if they cut something out of me, or I’d remember but not what it was, my vocal cords or something else, it didn’t matter, everything hurt. And that dream—was I pregnant when they brought me to you, Doctor? Was I?_

A long pause. His voice, when he does speak, is choked. Is trying to be matter-of-fact, is failing.

“No,” he says. “The damage—there was too much. But—” he hesitates—“I think—this is only a theory, mind you—I think you might have been. Before.”

 _Oh._ The curtain is so unreal. The tears sliding down her face are unreal. _Could you tell what they--_

“No. It might have been a miscarriage, or an abortion, or a birth. I don’t know.”

She turns then, and lets him pull her to him; buries her face in his chest. He is the only solid thing in her life, the only thing she knows to be real. She feels as though a pane of glass has broken somewhere inside of her; each time she so much as thinks, the sharp edge slides along her heart. _Doctor, if I had been--_

She can’t finish, but he understands. 

“I hope I would have woken you up,” he says. His voice soft, stirring her hair with each syllable. “I hope I wasn’t so far gone that I would—I hope I would have given you that choice.”

She nods against his chest, and holds him tight. Hope—that is all they have. And precious little of that. 

“Do you still want to stay?” he asks, his grip loosening slightly. “I can make it to the chair to sleep if you’d rather—”

 _You’re my friend,_ she interrupts. _I trust you._ She holds him tighter still, her hands bunching in the blanket behind his back. _Keep the nightmares away for me?_

He brushes a kiss to the top of her forehead. “All the ones I can. Always.”


End file.
